


A Fox Among Wolves

by ZombiBird



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: "Boy would a 21st century woman give Arthur Morgan a run for his money", Action/Adventure, As One Does, Depression, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Friends to Lovers, I never thought I'd ever write a "modern woman gets transported to the world of [blank]" fic, I was just laying in bed one night, My morally confused son deserves a happy ending goddamn it, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Period-Typical Sexism, References to Depression, Romance, Slow Burn, a new fic is born, and boom, and thought to myself, but here i am, contemplating RDR2
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-20
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2019-09-23 03:20:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17072543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZombiBird/pseuds/ZombiBird
Summary: "She wishes for a new beginningShe wishes for a fresh start in a new place where she won’t know what tomorrow will bring- and that’ll be a good thing. She wishes for a life where she doesn’t live every day wrapped up in shackles of guilt, wishes for the adventure she never got to have – always too busy with her work. She wishes for the strength to stand on her own, for the will to be happy again.She wishes to know what it means to be free."[***Previously titled Begin Again, a temp title I didn't realize was a temp title until I thought of something better]





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm not done with RDR2 yet (though the ending has been spoiled for me *shakes fist at tumblr*) but I absolutely needed to get this out of my system before I got any farther.

Royce hates clocks. Wrist watches, too. But mostly clocks. Particularly the big ones.

She hates the way they have to _tick, tick, tick_ all the time, drawing out the silence in a room that would otherwise have been perfectly comfortable and warping it into something perfectly unsettling.

Royce shifts in her seat, staring down the grandfather clock tucked away in the corner of the study, all but overshadowed by the large, taxidermy bear that occupies the space beside it. Looking over the creature, she notices that its eyes have been removed sometime between her last visit and now, and she isn’t sure if Florian had done it in an attempt to make the thing less creepy, or more so.

Knowing the woman as she did, Royce would probably guess it was an even combination of the two.

Florian ducks through the doorway then, her ever-present wine glass in hand, and offers Royce a welcoming smile. She saunters lazily across the study, bare feet treading light over the ornate carpet, and plops herself down on the settee across from Royce.

“It’s been a while.” Florian notes casually, chasing her sentence with a sip of red wine.

“It has.” Royce agrees, running a hand back through her hair in a valiant attempt to quell the orange tangle of curls that’s fallen into her face again. It goes about as well as it usually does- which is to say, it does absolutely nothing other than provide an outlet for her nerves, “I’ve been… busy.”

That gets Florian’s attention, “Getting back into the swing of things, I hope?” And the way she says it isn’t unkind (it’s spoken gently, more hopeful than anything), but Royce can’t help the shock of ice water it sends running through her veins.

“Not even a little bit.” Royce says, hands fisting over the thighs of her jeans in some vague attempt to contain her temper, “I just- I _can’t_ , alright? Tell you the truth, I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to again.” Every time she tries to put pen to paper, she just remembers that night. Remembers the horror and the blood, the soul-shattering mortification that had consumed her when she found out the _why_ behind it all- that it wouldn’t ever have happened if she’d just kept her songs to herself. Safe inside her head where they couldn’t get anybody killed.

The session passes in waves of numbness and after that, when their hour is up, and once Royce has finished thoroughly gutting herself, she can’t get out of Florian’s penthouse apartment fast enough. She doesn’t _like_ being upset- she’s never really known anguish before, known hatred, known _rage_. She’s always been a bit of a hothead, sure, but the sweltering heat of lividity that would set her ablaze in the face of adversity never used to linger any longer than it would take for her to cool down.

But now isn’t like that. She can’t smother that fire like she used to. Can’t just pretend that everything is coming up roses when everyone and their mother knows that it damn well isn’t.

She hates it, the way she feels nowadays. Like she’s burning up from the inside-out. She can feel her organs being overtaken by rot, the blood in her veins churning itself into a sour pitch that drowns her heart in its viscous weight.

So, she just. Builds a hearth around her molten core- tries to contain the fire as best she can and hope that nobody notices the heat it gives off. Closes the flue and lets the smoke clog her lungs, doesn’t ever exhale too quickly for fear of it escaping into the open air.

That’s what she’s doing when she steps out of the elevator into the lobby of Florian’s building: quelling the fire – or trying to. Stomping it down to cinder-strewn ashes in her gut because that’s the best she can seem to do these days.

 

* * *

 

At home, Mrs. Vernal welcomes her at the door with a gentle smile, wearied brows drawing tight and sorrowful as Royce kicks off her shoes in the foyer, unconcerned with storing them properly right now. The silence is awkward, but not unusual – Vernal never seems to know what to say to her when she comes back from ‘ _visiting Killian._ ’

She settles on asking, “I trust you didn’t get caught in the rain, Miss Mercy?”

Royce’s smile is easy, feels familiar on her face despite it not being as genuine as it once was, “I did,” She lies, “But some poor soul took pity on my drenched self and bought me an umbrella. Which was very nice of him, because drenched widow is not a look that would suit me.”

Nobody ever seems to know how to react when she speaks so casually of Killian’s death, but it’s the only way she knows how to talk about him without bringing the rotting feeling back. That twisting monsoon of despair that would otherwise drag her into the depths and swallow her whole.

Vernal is no different than the masses, and her returned smile is awkward in that it is far too confused to be anything close to sincere, “Is there anything I can get for you, Miss?”

“No, Vernal, I think I’m quite alright. In fact, why don’t you take the evening off? Your son is home visiting from University this week, is he not? Why don’t you spend some time with him before his studies whisk him away again- Oh! I know-” Royce is already pulling out her wallet to retrieve her credit card; plated an obnoxiously opulent shade of gold that isn’t in any way subtle, “how about I treat the two of you to dinner?”

Mrs. Vernal’s eyes grow to the approximate size of tea saucers, withered face instantly flushing scarlet, “Oh, I couldn’t-!”

“-Nonsense!” Royce assures the sputtering matron as she tucks the card into her palm and closes the woman’s fingers around it, “You never let me do anything nice for you – think of this as one grand repayment!” She pulls Vernal’s coat from the hooks beside the door and drapes it around her shoulders, wrapping a woolen scarf loose around her neck as the woman continues to sputter protests.

“Now,” Royce tells her, taking her from behind by the shoulders and leading her back towards the front door, “You go out and treat your boy to something nice- anyplace you want. Hell, take him shopping, too. I trust you to return my card to me tomorrow alongside a grand rendition of your evening!” And with that, she’s pushing Mrs. Vernal out the door and closing it behind her, perhaps a bit more theatrically than is really necessary.

Once the lock is in place, Royce allows her smile to drop and heaves a sigh, head dropping forward to thump against the door.

Alone.

Fucking _finally._

 

* * *

  

By midnight, Royce has retreated to the back garden of the manor; wild and overgrown now that Killian’s no longer around to maintain it properly. She’s never seen any point in going to visit Killian at the cemetery, not when she has his prized garden – his physical body may be buried elsewhere, but it’s here that his soul remains.

It’s here, in the darkness of night amongst the chirping of crickets and croaking of bullfrogs, that Royce feels closest to him.

“I know you wouldn’t want me hung up on this,” She says to him, deluding herself into imagining that somewhere out there in the universe, her words are actually being heard, “You’d never want me to just… to just put my life on hold like this. Not for you- not for anybody.” The stepping stones winding through the garden are cool against her bare feet, still damp from the afternoon’s rainfall.

“I guess, in some sense I’m getting better,” She speaks through the prickling sensation behind her eyes, “I’m singing again – new stuff, not just the old – and it… it feels good. I just. I just can’t bring myself to create any record of it, to risk somebody else happening upon it. It’s illogical- the same thing happening twice. I know that. But there’s just this _fear_ now that if I ever sing again, bear my soul to the world like I used to, someone like him will crop up again-” Royce’s voice cracks as she speaks around a bitter laugh, “-like I’m so fucking self-centered as to think it'll happen again, but I just-”

She hugs her arms around herself, feeling small as she speaks into the emptiness of the night, “-that’s the definition of a phobia, isn’t it? An irrational fear?”

Pacing through the maze of trellises and untamed greenery, Royce finds herself wondering, not for the first time, just what the hell she’s supposed to do now. Even when her and Killian weren’t _together_ , they were always together- ever since they were children. They’d been practically joined at the hip, and after Royce’s father died… Killian was all she’d had.

Just as she’s never known breathing without lungs, she’s never known living without him.

Royce eventually finds herself in the very depths of Killian’s garden – a romantic little spot carved out in the center of the trellis maze with a koi pond and a cherry tree with a swing and an old wishing well left over from the late 1800’s.

His magic garden – their favorite spot.

 

 _“-no, I’m telling you, Roy, it’s_ magic _.” And the way Killian said it, so adamant and unwavering in his belief, had Royce laughing._

_“Oh really?” Royce said, tone teasing as she danced around to the other side of the well, sun dress shifting pleasantly in the summer breeze. She crossed her arms over the lip of it, then, dropping her chin to her forearms as she smirked at him from across the well, “Prove it, Alverez.”_

_Now it was Killian who looked smug, “It doesn’t work like that, Roy.”_

_Royce snorted, “Then, pray tell, how_ does _it work, Ian?”_

_Killian leaned over his side of the well, mimicking her pose, “You have to want it.”_

_“Oh, that’s all?” She’d laughed, “I have to_ want _it?”_

 _“You need to want it desperately, more than you’ve ever wanted anything else,” He’d told her, digging a quarter from his pocket and holding it between them without looking away from her, “You need to want it more than life itself, to the point where you_ need _more than just_ want _. And as you make your wish and pay the well-” He gives the quarter an unusually fond look before releasing it, letting it fall into the depths of the well. Royce never heard it reach the bottom. When he looked back to her, his eyes – blue as the summer sky – are intense, storming, “-the Universe has to agree.”_

_She’d felt a chill rush up her spine as she asked, mouth dry, “What’d you wish for?”_

_He’d just smiled at her, eyes fond, and then asked, as casually as one might inquire after the weather, “You willing to marry me, Roy?”_

_She’d said yes, of course, and then he’d laughed, loud and mirthful, grinning bigger than she’d ever seen him grin as he said,_ “ _See?_ Magic _._ ”

Royce leans over the well, the memories of that day running warm through her mind. Feeling melancholic and ever-so-slightly infected by Killian’s childish belief, she fishes a quarter out of her back pocket and holds it out flat in the palm of her hand, lowering herself so she can peer at it from eye level as she holds it out over the well.

Assuming that nothing can be done to change the past, (“ _Everything happens for a reason_ ,” Killian always used to tell her), what would she wish for, if she could? If Killian’s well really _was_ magic? She thinks about it long and hard – far longer and far harder than a grown woman should be wishing for anything over a thousand-year-old well.

She wishes for a new beginning.

She wishes for a fresh start in a new place where she won’t know what tomorrow will bring- and that’ll be a _good_ thing. She wishes for a life where she doesn’t live every day wrapped up in shackles of guilt, wishes for the adventure she never got to have – always too busy with her work. She wishes for the strength to stand on her own, for the will to be happy again.

She wishes to know what it means to be free.

Royce sucks in a breath and closes her eyes as she sets the wish free, turning over her hand and letting the coin slide off her palm into the dark abyss below.

She never hears it reach the bottom.


	2. Fucking Magic

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "If Royce weren’t having an internal meltdown and trying her best not to come to the conclusion that fucking magic had ripped her out of her garden and tried to drown her, she’d commend the boy for how well he’s taking all of this."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank y'all for all the kind comments and the kudos left on chapter 1! Like pretty much everything I write, this was cranked out on a whim so I'm glad to find that people like the angle I'm going for. (I agonized how I was going to pull the "modern woman in the world of [blank]" AU when the world I was putting her into wasn't one like, say, Dragon Age or Skyrim where magic is a thing, but I also didn't wanna have absolutely no rhyme or reason behind the sudden realm hopping so I was like "wishing well????") Anyways, enough of my blubbering. I hope everybody had a happy holiday and that y'all enjoy chapter 2 :)
> 
> P.S. Updates will probably be a bit slower in the beginning, as I am still playing my way through RDR2 and want to stay relatively ahead of where I am in-fic to allow time/space for myself to adjust plot points and avoid inconsistencies or instances where I'd need to retcon shit.

Water clogs her lungs as she gasps for air that isn’t there, invades her nostrils as she comes to realize her surroundings. Royce is… underwater. Somewhere murky, green; filled with fish and algae. When she kicks down, her bare feet meet the scummy underbelly of what feels to be a lake bed. She surges up through the water, far more uncoordinated than she’d like to be in this kind of situation.

Breaking the surface of the water, Royce gasps, sputters as she coughs up a truly _disgusting_ volume of water. Her sodden hair clings to her face, covering her eyes as she struggles to remain afloat, trying desperately to catch her breath. Her mind is playing over a litany of _what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck_ \- she’d dropped the damn coin and then she’d just- _what the fuck?!_

Royce can hear somebody yelling and water nearby sloshing, and then she’s being grabbed by the crook of her arm and dragged against a wiry body. In the back of her mind, Royce vaguely registers them as male, probably in their late teens or early twenties. The boy is dragging her through the water – towards the shore, she realizes – and as soon as the water is shallow enough to stand in, she’s pushing away from him and flopping down into the mud.

“-oh Christ!” The boy yells, dropping down to his knees as Royce pushes herself up on her elbows, coughing so hard it feels like her throat is bleeding. He grips her by her shoulders and hauls her up against her better wishes, forcing her to brace herself on his forearms as she staggers to her feet, “ _Jesus,_ Miss, where in the hell ’d you come from?!” He’s freaking out and Royce really doesn’t blame him because _boy,_ she’d love to know the answer to that one herself.

Once Royce is no longer in danger of falling over, she eases the boy off her and uses both hands to push her hair out of her face, slicking the unruly curls back so they’re no longer obstructing her vision. She looks up to the boy, chest heaving as she works through the last of the coughing.

Everything about him screams _hillbilly_ , from the mud-slicked overalls to the almost vintage looking undershirt and work boots. He’s gaping at her like she might as well be an alien, and Royce kind of gets it, because this kid was apparently here to witness her just bloody _apparate_ in the middle of a pond.

 “Where am I?” She rasps once she manages to find her voice.

The boy’s eyes are glued to her collar, where a good portion of her tattoos are peaking out of her now-ruined sweater. When he doesn’t respond, she lifts a hand and snaps her fingers in his face, gold wedding band gleaming in the light of the sun’s last rays, “Hey, kid. Where’re we at?” And she’s proud to find she sounds significantly less like a chain smoker this time- though her throat’s still burning something awful.

He swallows thickly, doesn’t seem to know where to look as he stutters out, “Jus- Just a little ways outta Valentine, Ma’am.”

Royce can feel her brows furrowing, “And where would _that_ be?”

His face shrivels, expression an even mix of confusion and bashfulness, “U-Uhm… New Hanover?”

Royce scowls, “The _fuck_ is New Hanover?”

The boy looks positively _bamboozled_ at this. He extends an arm towards her, as if intending to support her should she fall, and asks, “Are you okay, Miss…?”

“- _Royce_.” She tells him, “Royce Mercy.” Then, in answer to his question, she says, “And no, no I am not okay- five minutes ago I was at home and now I’m here,” Royce casts their immediate surroundings – literally just a whole lot of nature and _nothingness_ – a cursory glance before amending, “Wherever _here_ is.”

 The boy sputters- doesn’t seem to know what to do or say. Royce gets the distinct impression that she and Toto aren’t in Kansas anymore. After what feels like forever, he says, “How’s about I take you on home to my folks’ place and you can get yerself cleaned up? It’s gonna be mighty dark soon, Miss Mercy, an’ you’ll catch your death wandrin’ around dressed as you are.”

If Royce weren’t having an internal meltdown and trying her best not to come to the conclusion that _fucking magic_ had ripped her out of her garden and tried to drown her, she’d commend the boy for how well he’s taking all of this.

Under normal circumstances, there’s no way in hell Royce would just _go home_ with a stranger, but there’s nothing _normal_ about what just happened, so she’s willing to let her street smarts sit this one out.

Royce looks down, taking in her water-logged attire and grimaces, “I guess I’d be okay with that,” She tells him, glancing up to look over his figure suspiciously, “Just… don’t try anything funny.”

His eyes widen, and he sputters, “I’d never, Miss Mercy-!” At whatever look she must be giving him, he snaps his mouth shut, kneading at his neck with his hand for a few moments before saying, “My horse is this way.”

Royce looks at him for a moment, unamused, because _really?_ A _horse_? But the kid is dead serious as he extends his arm to her, and it takes her a hot second to realize that he’s trying to _escort her_ like some lady of the court or something, “Uh, no thanks, kid.” She tells him, opting instead to follow behind him as he leads her to where a handsome palomino is grazing by a nearby tree.

There are ropes knotted with fish draped over the animal’s rear, and when the boy catches her looking at them, he says, “Been fishin’ most of the day. Had just mounted up t’ head home when you-” He clears his throat, “…well.” He climbs up on the horse and looks down to her expectantly.

Royce stares at the creature, wondering just how in the hell she’s going to replicate that feat of hillbilly magic, “I’ve never, uh…”

A look of understanding washes over the boy’s face, “Oh-! of course,” and he’s off the horse as fast as he’d climbed on it. With little to no preamble, he’s gripping her by her waist and lifting her up to set her on the beast’s back just a little ways behind the saddle. He remounts then, pulling himself up just as easily as he had before. Royce struggles to bend her left leg up so she can straddle the horse properly, entirely uncomfortable about the idea of riding side-saddle.

“I never got your name, kid.” She says as he takes the reigns and begins to steer them out of the clearing and away from the pond. The bumpiness of the horse’s gallop isn’t something Royce is used to, and she feels like if she doesn’t hold onto something, she’s going to slide right off its ass, so she begrudgingly reaches forwards, gripping the boy by the waist.

“Oh,” He says, sounding bashful, “’m name’s Archie. Archie Downes.”

 

* * *

 

The ride is long and uncomfortable and only further confirms Royce’s assumption that this place – she doesn’t know whether to call it Valentine or New Hanover. Doesn’t really know the difference between the two and, frankly, is too afraid to ask – is in the middle of no-where.

The roads aren’t paved and there’s not a sign in sight that isn’t wooden. Every structure they pass (which really isn’t all that many) looks like something straight out of the episodes of _Little House on the Prairie_ that she and Killian used to watch when they were kids.

The house that Archie brings them to is a rather cute looking (not so very cute _smelling_ ) farm house atop a steep hill – probably not nearly as steep as it had felt – that had Royce clinging to the boy for dear life. By the time they reach the little ranch and Archie slides off the horse, Royce can see hear breath and night has fully descended.

Wherever they are, its time seems to differ greatly from New York.

As Archie is helping Royce down off the horse, the door to the house swings open and a haggard looking woman, perhaps only five or six years older than Royce, rushes down the front steps, “There you are!” She’s yelling, “You was supposed ‘t- _Oh!_ ” She notices Royce as she comes to a halt a few feet away.

Archie clears his throat as Royce tries to re-style at her now mostly dry hair, reclaiming the hair tie from her wrist and pulling the section of curls above her undercut up into a loose bun, leaving her bangs loose to flop back into her face, “Mama, this is Miss Royce Mercy. There was, uh…” He swallows, seeming lost for words, “An _incident_ out at the lake an’ I told her she could come back with me ‘t get herself sorted out.”

Archie’s mother blinks at her owlishly, and Royce thinks she must be in the depths of Amish country or something, because, really, her tattoos don’t warrant anywhere near this much staring. Feeling self-conscious, Royce tugs at the neck of her sweater, wishing she could turn it into a turtle-neck. That seems to snap Mrs. Downes out of her reverie, as her eyes snap up to meet Royce’s and she says, “Of course, dear. Why don’t you come in an’ warm yourself up while Archie takes care of Nisha?”

Warmth. Warmth would be nice. Warmth would be nicer than nice because Royce is pretty sure her clothes are on the verge of frosting. Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it sure feels that way. Royce gives a jittery nod and doesn’t protest when Mrs. Downes takes her by the crook of her arm to lead her inside.

 

* * *

 

An hour and a warm bowl of fish soup later, Mrs. Downes has led Royce to her and Mr. Downes’ room and is trifling through her wardrobe in search of something that might fit her. It’s all dresses but Royce doesn’t voice her disappointment at that, and instead gratefully accepts the nightgown that Mrs. Downes finds for her, alongside a faded green and white dress for her to wear tomorrow.

She still reeks of pond water, but the Downes’ don’t seem to be in possession of running water, let alone a tub for a bath, so Royce doesn’t bother asking after one. These people have already extended their home to her for the night, to ask for anything more would be rude.

Left alone to change, Royce peels off her still-damp clothing. Her phone tumbles out of her back pocket as she strips her jeans off her legs and she winces, wondering what the chances are of the device being operable are after being submerged in a lake. Slim to none, she thinks, but there’s no downside to asking if the Downes’ have a bag of rice or something that she can stick it in overnight just to be sure.

She tosses it on the bed, then, and begins the unpleasant process of extracting herself from her sweater. Prior to tonight, it had probably been one of her favorites; soft, thick, and grey with too-long sleeves that she could pull over her hands. She thinks it might have belonged to Killian, once, back when they were teenagers, but those days feel like a lifetime ago and she can hardly be certain. When it slops into a sodden heap on the floor, its exact origin no longer matters – if the small holes that already existed in it hadn’t marked it for decommission before, the trip through the well (or whatever the hell that had been) had certainly made sure of it now.

The nightgown Mrs. Downes picked out for her is long, white, and warm with teardrop sleeves that button at the wrists and a high neckline. The dry fabric feels like heaven on her still-clammy skin, even though it’s a bit scratchier than the clothing she’s used to. All is well in the world – or at least as much can be well in Royce’s world, given the turn her evening’s taken – until she goes to retrieve her phone from the bed and her eyes land on the newspaper that’s been discarded on the nightstand.

**_1899_ **

The numbers stare up at her, solemn as death and just as terrifying. Royce wants to find some sort of justification- like anybody would just _have_ a mint condition newspaper circa 1899 sitting around- but deep in her gut the terror is already forming, and she just _knows._ She wants it to be fake or severely outdated or _something_ , but she just _knows_. Knows because it would explain literally every strange thing that’s happened since she got here. All the staring at her tattoos and her piercings, the lack of paved roads and modern road signs – it all made sense in a world-shattering, deeply terrible sort of way.

Jesus fucking fuck.

Hands shaking, Royce lifts her phone from the bed and clutches it to her chest as she eases out a quivering breath. It can’t be real, she wants to tell herself. It’s got to be a dream, some horrid nightmare- but she knows this feeling. This numbness. The disassociation that comes with unfavorable news.

It was a fugue that Royce had stumbled through for weeks after Killian died. She was all too familiar with the feeling – the not wanting to know, not wanting to accept, but all the while _knowing_ deep inside that no matter how much she told herself that it wasn’t real, it _was_ and no amount of ignoring it and pretending everything was roses was going to change it.

“ _Fuck_.” Royce whispers into the empty room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, Mrs. Vernal back in modern day New York is set for life- or she would be, if she wasn't totally the type of person to immediately report Royce missing and hand that gilded credit card over to the proper authorities. Oh well, her loss.


	3. Everything Happens For a Reason

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "She fell through a magic well, materialized at the bottom of a lake, found out that she got punted back in time to the ass-end of the 18th century and can’t even figure out if it’s a bad thing yet. Royce’s wish, the one she made before she’d dropped the coin…
> 
> It’s crazy, but she can’t help but think that, maybe- maybe she’s where she’s supposed to be, now."

“Are you alright in there, dear?” Royce startles as Mrs. Downes’ muffled voice sounds through the bedroom door. She doesn’t know how long she’s been standing here by the bed, just staring at the paper, but it’s apparently been long enough to cause some concern.

“Y-Yes ma’am!” Royce calls back, quickly tucking her phone into the sleeve of her nightgown before collecting her clothes off the floor. When she pulls the door open, Mrs. Downes is waiting for her and Royce ducks her head in a bow, “I’m sorry, I was just… I guess I’m still a bit frazzled.”

Mrs. Downes’ smile is soft and welcoming as she takes Royce by the crook of the arm and offers her bicep a consolatory pat, “Of course, dear, after the night you’ve had- a horse is a horse, but buckin’ a lady into a lake and just runnin’ off?” Mrs. Downes tuts, “Are you sure you wouldn’t like me t’ sent Archie out lookin’ for her, dear?”

Inwardly, Royce winces. Though she and Archie had largely… _skirted around_ the subject of just _how_ he’d found her, they’d acknowledged it enough during the ride back to agree that the truth probably wasn’t what they should tell his parents. So, she’d let Archie come up with the more believable tale of her being bucked into the pond by her horse – spooked by a snake as she was passing through. As for where she’d been headed? She hadn’t been passing through to anyplace in particular, she’d just been headed _someplace else_ and that’s all she’d really care to say on the matter.

Royce has no way of knowing what sort of story Mr. and Mrs. Downes had put together from reading between the lines of that, but it had been enough that they were more than happy to find a place in their home for her to stay for the next few days.

“I’m sure, ma’am.” Royce tells Mrs. Downes as she leads her down the hall to Archie’s room – Royce had insisted that she’d be happy to stay up in the loft, but Mrs. Downes had just looked at her like the disappointed mother that Royce had never had and laid out, in no uncertain terms, how much that was absolutely _not_ going to happen under her roof, “That filly was always a wily thing- she’s long gone by now.”

Maybe it was a byproduct of being married to Killian, who was always in constant need of somebody to run lines with, but Royce has always been _absurdly_ good at acting – improv in particular.

Archie’s room is, unsurprisingly, smaller than Royce’s closet, but she’s not about to complain as Mrs. Downes leads her inside. Royce discards her dirty clothes by the foot of the bed – the frame splintered and wooden, mattress probably stuffed with straw – to be dealt with later. As she’s coming back up from her partial bend, Mrs. Downes asks, soft and tentative, “And you’re sure you’re feeling alright, dear?”

No, she isn’t.

She fell through a magic well, materialized at the bottom of a lake, found out that she got punted back in time to the ass-end of the 18th century and can’t even figure out if it’s a _bad thing_ yet. Royce’s wish, the one she made before she’d dropped the coin…

It’s crazy, but she can’t help but think that, maybe- maybe she’s where she’s supposed to be, now.

_“Everything happens for a reason, Roy.”_

Royce clears her throat, mouth feeling dry, and schools her face into a soft smile, “I’m fine, ma’am- just saddle sore and knackered. Nothing that can’t be fixed with a good night’s sleep.”

Mrs. Downes doesn’t look entirely convinced as she retreats to the door, but relents none-the-less, “Well, don’t be a stranger, Miss Mercy- y’all let us know if y’need anything.”

“Sure thing, ma-” Not for the first time tonight, Royce has to cut herself off with a cough. She doesn’t know much about The Old West™ (She hardly thinks watching shows like _Cheyanne_ and _Gunsmoke_ makes her any real authority on the matter), but given as she’s been nothing but ‘ _dear_ ’ and ‘ _Miss Mercy_ ’ since she got here, she’s got a feeling that calling an older woman ‘ _mate_ ’ would be something of a faux pas, “-ma’am.”

“A good night to y’ then, Miss Mercy.” Mrs. Downes says softly before retreating out of the room and pulling the door shut.

Royce, not very well knowing what else to do, hides her cell phone in the bedframe underneath the mattress and resigns herself to a long night of staring up at the ceiling, awake, waiting for the fresh horrors of tomorrow.

So, really, nothing entirely new.

 

* * *

 

Royce passes out sometime around midnight – what would probably be five or six in the morning back home, given the apparent time difference – and wakes up with the morning’s first light as it pours into Archie’s bedroom window, which Royce had forgotten to draw the curtains of the night prior. Her hair, forever in her face, absolutely _reeks_ of pond scum, and she decides that she is going to find a way to wash it today if it kills her.

She is not above praying to the universe for rain- if a wishing well can shit her into the past, the sky can surely cough up enough water for her to rinse the parp-stink from her hair.

It’s only fair.

Royce spends the morning helping Mrs. Downes prepare breakfast while Archie and Mr. Downes tend to the animals and the garden, ends up finally convincing the woman after twenty ‘ _Miss Mercy_ ’s too many to just call her Royce, and pops the person hygiene question some time after that.

When Royce had asked, of course, she’d only inquired after any relatively private streams in the area (that was something people did these days, wasn’t it?) for her to wash up in. Mrs. Downes laughs, saying there isn’t any need for that, and presses a coin purse into her palm as she tells her, “Archie’s goin’ into town today, you c’n go with ‘im – get yerself a bath at the board house and pick yerself out some fresh clothes.”

Royce tries to protest, but just like last night, Mrs. Downes isn’t having any of it. (She’s a very pushy woman, Royce has learned) So, that’s how Royce finds herself riding into town with Archie later that morning. She must look rather odd, she thinks, with one of Archie’s high collared button-up shirts on over her dress and a pair of oversized work gloves on, but it was the only way she could think to cover her tattoos.

It would be best, she thinks, to try and not draw too much attention to herself.

The town – Valentine – is bigger than Royce had been expecting it to be, which is a rather pleasant surprise. Archie’s got business to take care of (he doesn’t say what kind), so he can’t show her around, but he nicely points out the general store and the motel. He says he’ll likely finish his business before she finishes her’s, and, after pointing that out to her too, tells her that he’ll wait for her by the livery stable.

Royce keeps her time in the general store brief, uncomfortable under the not-at-all subtle staring of the man behind the counter. Their selection of on-hand clothes is surprisingly decent, and Royce ends up picking herself out a light blue button up blouse with a brown leather vest to layer over it, some faded grey jeans, and a pair of black steel-toed cowboy boots (or are they just ‘boots’ these days?). On a whim, she tacks a couple rolls of bandages, a box of safety pins, and a pair of fingerless leather work gloves onto her order.

The man behind the counter, polite despite his blatant staring, is nice enough to give her a basket for her to carry her things in.

The cost of a bath at the hotel is only twenty-five cents, but Royce thinks that it might just be the best twenty-five cents she’s ever spent. Or, at the very least, the most gratifying. It feels strange, washing her hair with a bar of soap, but it’s far from bad.

Royce doesn’t know when she’s going to get to bathe again – she’d rather this be the last day she uses money that isn’t her own – so she makes the most of it.

Her new clothes fit nicely – blouse is loose, pants and vest snug how she likes them. She thinks the boots will take some time to break in, but they’re more comfortable than the work boots of Archie’s that she’d borrowed and had to wear three pairs of socks to make fit.

Archie is waiting for her at the livery stable when she’s finished making herself presentable, just as he said he would be, and if the pink of his cheeks as he helps her back up onto the carriage is any indication, he likes Royce’s new duds just as much as she does.

The days pass quickly after that first slow morning, and before Royce knows it, a week has passed. Every morning she wakes up wondering if today will be the day the Downes’ generosity comes to an end, but they never ask her to leave.

Life goes on.

Royce teaches herself to fish. She’s terrible, at first, but she gets the hang of it quickly. It’s relaxing, she thinks, just… taking the time to herself. She misses her music more than anything, though, so she sings to herself to pass the time; content in knowing that the chances of somebody hearing her out here in the sticks are slim to none.

Law of averages, though, somebody was bound to happen upon her eventually.

And that, is how Royce meets Arthur Morgan.


	4. A Chance Encounter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a sad testament to Royce’s luck that she can’t even sing to herself in the middle wo no-where without accruing an audience.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the wait. This chapter was originally going to be much, much longer, spanning from Royce and Arthur's first encounter all the way to the debt collection mission, but no matter how I tried pacing it, it just seemed like a scatterbrained hodgepodge in desperate need of sorting.
> 
> Hence the clipping. 
> 
> (Side note: when writing this, I tried to make it out to be something that could easily have been one of the random encounters you can happen upon in-game, hence Arthur being the main POV. Hope y'all enjoy it!)

Truth be told, Arthur isn’t quite sure what he’s doing anymore these days. It feels like he’s away from camp more than he’s in it, and whenever he _is_ there, the only thing on his mind is finding a reason to slip away again. Things just don’t feel the same as they used to, is all. Dutch is different than he was- not starkly, but enough that it sets Arthur on edge, makes hanging around for too long uncomfortable bordering on painful.

So, Arthur keeps away from camp.

He never really finds something to do so much as something to do finds him. He’s always in _just_ the right place that way, so it really shouldn’t come as such a surprise that he comes across the Singer the way he does.

The gang hasn’t been in these parts for more than a week now, and Arthur’s been so busy making sure they don’t go hungry that he hadn’t had much reason to stray too far from the overlook yet. He’s farther out that he’s ever been before, the morning that he finds her. He’s got his mind set on doing some fishing – will be a nice change of pace, he thinks, and God knows he could use some peace and quiet, what with the way everybody seems to be squabbling lately.

He’s probably six or seven miles out when he hears the singing.

It’s very clearly a woman’s voice- thick like honey, clear as a summer’s day, and smoky in a way that has Arthur’s hairs standing on end. It’s hypnotizing, almost, how empathetic the voice is, swelling with emotions so complex that Arthur wouldn’t even begin to decipher them.

And yet he feels them as if they were his own.

Arthur means to push on and ignore it, but the closer he gets to the fishing hole he’d picked out on his map the clearer the voice gets, and as he turns the downhill bend leading out of the brush to the pond, he finds the owner of the voice, perched atop an upturned metal bucket on the bank with a fishing rod in hand as she croons into the open air with her back to the woods.

Voice aside, the first thing Arthur notices about the woman is her hair. Thick and wild and vibrantly orange, it’s been tamed into a sloppy bun. What’s strange about it though, is that from the midpoint of her ears downwards, her mane has been cut away; shaved down close to the skin. Her ears, he can see, are riddled with golden piercings the likes of which Arthur’s never seen; hoops and beads and bars and spikes, packed together from lobe to cartilage.

Incredibly strange, and, Arthur guesses, far from cheap.

Before Arthur’s brain can inform his mouth of its plan to turn around and leave the woman to her crooning, he’s calling out to her, “That’s a mighty nice voice you got, miss.”

The woman’s song cuts off abruptly with a strangled yelp.

She whirls around on her bucket, fishing rod falling to the mud, and for a brief moment the entire world seems to freeze. The first thing Arthur registers is _freckles_. Mapping every inch of exposed skin; more freckles than Arthur could ever dream of counting, fit to the point that she looks more freckles than skin- spreading so far as to even reside on her _lips._ The second thing Arthur notes are her eyes, big and brown and expressively angular even as they widen in shock.

The third thing he notices is the jewelry.

Reminiscent of her ears, the woman has a golden hoop hooked through her left nostril, a small golden ball somehow also affixed to the space beside it. The bridge of her nose, too, is decorated, by a pair of small, cone-shaped barbs.

It hardly looks comfortable.

“ _Bloody fucking hell!_ ” She curses, breaking him out of his reverie, and Arthur could _swear_ there was a glint of something golden resting over her tongue. A few somethings, even, “Didn’t your mum teach y’ better’n to go ‘round spookin’ strangers?!” Her accent is strange, unlike anything Arthur can ever recall hearing before. It sounds almost English, but there’s a pronounced lilt to it that takes it into a distinctly different direction that’s not nearly as unbearably posh.

Arthur can feel himself smirking as he squints down at her from beneath the brim of his hat, “Can’t rightly say it was very high up on her list ‘a priorities.”

Her frown deepens, twisting into something that borders on aggressive as her gaze flits pointedly to the gun on his hip before coming back up to his eyes in unspoken question.

Arthur raises his hands and tilts his head, “Ain’t here to cause trouble, just lookin’ to do some fishin’, same ‘s you.”

The Singer doesn’t look entirely convinced, but her demeaner grows distinctly less hostile as she says, “Well, sorry, mate, this spot’s spoken for.” And then, face twisted into a deep-dimpled, too-white smile so radiant that if Arthur didn’t absolutely know better, he’d think it genuine, “You have a nice day now!”

If Arthur had been planning on leaving the Singer to her own devices prior to that moment, he sure as hell wasn’t anymore.

 

* * *

 

It’s a sad testament to Royce’s luck that she can’t even sing to herself in the middle wo no-where without accruing an audience.

“You ain’t never heard of sharin’?” The man is climbing down from his saddle now, and Royce really wishes he wouldn’t. He can’t very well ride off and leave her to her own devices is he’s not on his damn horse, can he?

“Oh, I have,” She tells him shortly, “I’ve just never been much good at it.”

The man’s smirking to himself as he flips open his saddlebag and trifles through it for a moment, hands finally emerging with a retractable fishing rod and a brown paper package the size of Royce’s fist, “Well allow me to teach ya, since yer momma was ‘parently too busy teachin’ you not ‘t spook strangers to bother with teachin’ you how to treat ‘em.”

He plods over to her, ignoring the mighty stink eye she’s giving him to find a place for himself along the bank a few feet from her, “It’s mighty simple, really; you stay where you’re at, doin’ what you were doin’, and I stay where I’m at, and we refrain from spittin’ insults at each other like civilized folk and maybe catch us a few fish fer our efforts.”

Royce huffs as the stranger makes himself comfortable, struggling to keep her damn mouth shut.

It’s like walking on glass, living in this place- living in this time. She has no idea how she’s allowed to act here- what behavior is safest and what behavior will get her killed or worse and she hates it. Hates this feeling. She’s never had to pull her punches before, never had to hold her tongue, never bothered to do anything other than make the best out of what she’s got because life’s too short to be boring.

But here? _Now?_ The rules have changed, and Royce doesn’t know where the hell that leaves her.

She feels like she’s suffocating.

 

* * *

 

They fish for a while- Arthur doesn’t know how long- and eventually, what started as tense silence grows into something more comfortable.

The Singer is leagues better at fishing than Arthur is. Arthur wants to tell himself that it’s just because she’s more familiar with the area but, really, he’s been painfully aware of his sub-par fishing prowess for a while now. It’s not exactly news.

Arthur finds himself trying to compete with Singer anyways.

It’s a silent, unspoken sort of competition between the two of them. Singer snickers to herself when Arthur’s line breaks (which is embarrassingly often), grants these patronizing looks when he pulls in something small and smirks around an eyeroll the one time he lands something big as if to say, ‘ _Yeah, so you’re not_ completely _terrible at this_.’

When it comes to her own catches, Singer just gets to sit there looking smug, really.

Some number of hours later, the sky begins to grey over. Singer frowns, pulls her line from the water and gets to packing up her things.

Arthur recognizes the storm clouds for what they are and follows suit.

By the time Singer has finished stringing up her fish and Arthur’s finished rolling his (admittedly pathetic) catch in paper and tucking it into his saddlebags, a steady rain has begun to fall. Singer doesn’t seem too concerned about it, just foists her catch over her shoulder and stars back towards the road.

Arthur mounts up and nudges Haunt to follow after her, pulling up slowly beside her and, because he’s nothing if not a fool, says, “You need a ride?”

The rain is coming down hard now, slicking Singer’s hair down in her face and plastering the sleeves of her blouse to her skin. Through the fabric, Arthur can make out what looks to be the lines of dozens of overlapping bandages; wrapped flush around the length of her arms and torso. The Singer frowns up at him, head tilting as she squints, as if trying to place his motive.

She must not find one, or, if she does, it isn’t one she likes, “Thanks, but I’d prefer to walk if it’s all the same to you,” She sounds out slowly, cautiously, as if expecting her refusal to send Arthur into a violent rage if it isn’t said _just so delicately_.

Disheartened by her unease but respecting of it, Arthur just nods and tips the brim of his hat to her with a, “Good day to you, then, miss.” Before digging his heels into Haunt’s haunches and leading the horse to a canter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have the time, I'd love some feedback :)
> 
> P.S. The accent that Royce is referenced to have is a New Zealand accent. While she lived in NY prior to being spat out in the 1899, she's only been in the states since she was a teenager.


	5. More than Mere Coincidence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first time had been a chance meeting, the second time had been a coincidence. Arthur isn't sure what to make of the third time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now that I've finished, I'm kicking myself a little because this chapter could have easily have been the second half of chapter 4, but oh well. At the time, everything just seemed like a confusing movie montage.
> 
> Also, to note going into this chapter: Royce refers to Archie and his family as "my husband and his family" in this chapter. Because of Royce's unrecognizable accent, sudden appearance, wedding ring, and sudden occupation of the Downes' Ranch, the people of Valentine have come to assume that Royce was a mail-order bride for Archie. Royce has made no efforts to correct them, and has, in fact, begun using it as something of a cover-story, also referring to her time spent in 2018 as "back in my home country"

Most folks, if they’re smart, will ride in the opposite direction when they hear gunshots.

Arthur Morgan is not most folks.

A shootout means winners, winners mean losers, and losers mean corpses to relieve of their earthly possessions – Given the current state of the camp, they can hardly afford to be picky about the sources of their funds. Unfortunately, Arthur had known riding up on the scene that it likely wouldn’t be a shootout; the shots never overlapped, coming in slow intervals of six every few minutes or so.

Hunting or target practice was a more likely scenario.

What Arthur hadn’t been expecting was the shock of orange hair and golden piercings that greeted him once he got there.

It’s clear from her stance that the Singer’s never handled a gun before in her life; holds it like it’s about to turn in her hands and pop her between the eyes. Her aim isn’t terrible- or, rather, it wouldn’t be terrible if she’d just hold the damn thing like she meant it. She’s got the idea right, just… entirely the wrong execution.

“You’re holdin’ it wrong.” Arthur draws blandly, and while he _was_ expecting to spook her, he wasn’t expecting to spook her to the point that she squeezes the trigger again as she fumbles backwards, sending another round into the dirt with a panicked yelp.

She whips the gun away as if trying to rid herself of some sort of incriminating evidence and whirls on him, eyes bugging from her skull in a frankly amusing cross between terror and rage, “ _Fucking_ -! You Clint Eastwood motherfucker _\- again?!_ ” And then, as if realizing that she’s just shouted profanities into the face of a stranger, her anger falls behind a carefully constructed curtain, leaving behind something much colder.

Cautious, calculating; the gaze of a fox.

Arthur leans forwards in his saddle, crossing his arms over the back of Haunt’s neck, “It’ll never do what y’want so long ‘s you’re afraid of it.”

The Singer eyes him with the same curious hesitance as last they met and informs him, voice dangerously even, “It’s harder than it looks.”

Arthur feels the corner of his mouth tick upwards, “It’s much easier if you do it right.”

“Grade-A advice mate,” The Singer scoffs as she paces forwards and bends over to pluck her pistol up out of the grass, “Never would have guessed.”

Arthur watches idly, mildly amused, as she brandishes the gun, picking torn-up blades of grass out from between her fingers. Tossing him a wary glance, she shifts back to her targets – and handful of old cans lined up on a dry-rotted fallen tree – mindful of him in the corner of her vision as she aims, pulling back the hammer in an awkward manner that has her having to aim again as soon as she’s done.

Unsurprisingly, she misses.

Breathing out around a chuckle, Arthur climbs down from his horse, tossing Haunt’s reigns around the horn of his saddle and trusting his mount not to wander, “Give it here,” He sighs as he makes his way towards her, extending a hand and flicking up his fingers.

He gets that screwed up look of suspicion again, but no backtalk. The Singer does, however, push open the chamber and dump the remaining three bullets into her hand before she gives it to him. Her hands are bandaged, Arthur realizes; wrapped meticulously up to the second knuckle in thin white fabric so as to not impede movement.

“Your husband not want you t’ learn or somethin’?” He asks instead of questioning the bandages as he closes his hand around the grip, eyes catching on the band wrapped around her ring finger over the bandages. At the pinched look the remark gets him, he adds, “Why can’t he teach ya?”

The Singer levels him an even look, ever-calculating, “I’m sure he would, if I asked. But he’s got more pressing matters to attend to, an’ I’ve always had better luck just teaching m’self whatever it is I need to know anyways.” She tosses her head towards her tin can targets, “But by all means, impart upon me your marksmanly wisdom.”

Scoffing, Arthur grips the gun as he would were he about to fire it and points it towards the tree line, “You keep shyin’ away from it – it can’t hurt you when it’s pointed in the opposite direction. Keep yer grip firm an’ yer trigger placement consistent. You had the right idea with aiming, but a piece like this kicks up, so you gotta aim a hair low t’ hit your target.” He lowers the gun, taking it by the barrel to offer it back to her, “An’ fer the love’a God, stop gogglin’ at it like that.”

“I do not _goggle_ ,” She tells him, sounding almost offended as she takes the gun back and slips the missing bullets back into the chamber, “I cautiously assess.”

“Assess less.”

“Fucking cute shit you think you are, eh?”

 

* * *

 

Eastwood laughs as Royce takes aim again, forcing her grip tighter. She still isn’t used to the weight of it- she’d always known guns were heavy, but. Well, she didn’t expect the weight to be so _concentrated_ , “You always curse like your life’s endin’?”

“Depends on what comp’ny I’m keeping.” Royce tells him as she pulls the hammer back and takes aim.

“You should give it some practice in yer off-time when it’s unloaded,” Eastwood tells her, nodding towards the gun before clarifying, “Just pullin’ the hammer back and reset’n it ‘till it feels more natural.”

Royce supposes he’s got a point; as things stand right now, her thumb cramps up whenever she cranes it up to try and get a grip on the hammer. It’s like when she first started teaching herself to play strings – how her fingers had always felt like they were on the brink of snapping in two before her hands got used to the stretch.

It would probably help if the gun hadn’t been made with a man’s hands in mind.

 

* * *

 

This time, the Singer doesn’t flinch back so much as she winces at the kick, closing her eyes and hoping for the best. She misses again, but likely not by nearly as much as she had been, “You let it scare y’gain.”

The look his observation grants him is flat as they come, her gaze not slipping away from him in the slightest as she retrieves another fistful of bullets from her belt and loads them into the chamber, “A small explosion is occurring literally two and a half feet from my face. You’ll have to excuse me if I find that sort of thing _startling_.”

Arthur huffs a chuckle as he retreats back to his mount, not wanting to overstay his welcome so long as the Singer is still so clearly unnerved by his presence – her being so focused on keeping an eye on him certainly isn’t helping her any.

“You’re thinkin’ too much!” He calls as he climbs back into his saddle. “Getting’ too much into yer own head, anticipatin’ the kick till it’s hurtin’ more’n helpin’. Jus’ do everything in one motion; let aimin’ flow into settin’ the hammer flow into pullin’ the trigger.”

She doesn’t have anything to say to his advice, just looks at him oddly- head quirked, face scrunched, still trying to pin down that illusive motive as he takes up his reigns and leaves her to her business.

 

*********

 

> _I crossed paths with the singer again. Shooting cans, or trying to. Strange woman, can’t quite get a figure for her story. Has all the makings of a wealthy woman but none of the class._
> 
> _[attached picture; a rough sketch of the singer, one knee pulled up nearly to her chest as she’d jolted backwards when Arthur had spoken, free hand flying upwards as she’d discharged a round into the dirt. Also included is a smaller close-up sketch of the singer’s face as it had been when she’d rounded on Arthur, her shock quickly morphing into red-faced anger.]_

*********

 

The next time Arthur happens across Singer is in the board house, of all places. He’d stayed in town late the night before, late enough that he didn’t rightly feel like riding back to camp, so he’d gone and rented out a room. After waking up at half past noon, he dresses himself and steps out the door only to have somebody walk directly into his side.

Arthur almost doesn’t recognize her at first. Her hair is down, pillowing loose and thick over her shoulders, and her strange, uncomfortable looking pieces of facial jewelry have been removed. Her blouse remains, but her usual vest is gone and her trousers have been exchanged for a long, faded maroon skirt and tie-around white apron.

It’s only after she jolts, careening backwards while spouting apologies, that he recognizes the accent, “- _so_ sorry, sir!” She’s saying frantically as she finally raises her bowed head to look at him. A beat of silence passes, then she recoils, face scrunching, “You again?”

 Arthur takes a moment to process what has happened, dumbly opting to parrot, “Me again.”

The Singer lets out a long sigh, straightens the hemline of her skirt where her blouse tucks into it and tells him, “We’ve really got to stop meeting like this.”

It’s easy, Arthur finds, to smile in her presence, “Not my fault you spook so easy.”

She huffs under her breath, adjusting the cuffs her gloves; white but well worn, “Wouldn’t spook if you stopped givin’ me reasons to.”

Chuckling, Arthur raises his hat to her as he makes his way towards her, “Well, it was my pleasure scarin’ you again, Miss. Until next time.” As he passes her, making his way towards the stairs, the Singer scoffs in spite of the reluctantly fond smile creeping at the corners of her mouth.

‘ _Next time_ ’ winds up being much sooner than they’d both thought.

 

* * *

 

Mr. Pattillo comes to find Royce not even five minutes after she’d started straightening up her first room of the afternoon, “Got a bath order for you.” He tells her from the doorway with a sympathetic smile.

Royce frowns, that familiar feeling of anxiety creeping up her spine. She likes her little part-time job here at the boarding house. Her boss, Mr. Pattillo, is one of the sweetest men she’s ever met (he lets her take baths for free), the hours are flexible, and the pay is – from what Royce can gather – more than a woman can usually expect to be making in one of the rare establishments that offer jobs to women.

The only part Royce can’t stand; fucking _bath orders_.

Royce feels like a softcore prostitute, if there was such a thing. Most of the board house’s customers are friendly folk, but rarely are the ones who order a woman to bathe them so pleasant. They treat her like some sort of gift to themselves after a hard week or month or… _however long_ it’s been since their last bath. She can handle being eye candy, it comes with the territory of show business, what she can’t handle is… whatever the hell it is her customers seem to expect from her.

Royce takes a deep breath, smooths over the sheets of the bed she’d been making, and nods, looking up to offer Mr. Pattillo a reassuring smile, “Sure thing, boss. I’ll finish up here and be right down.”

 

* * *

 

Arthur hurts all over.

He’s still sore from the bar fight last week and he’s been riding around playing errand boy for everybody and their mother for the last three days with practically no sleep. So, when the desk clerk comes knocking at the door asking if Arthur’d like him to send a girl in to give him a hand, he thinks, ‘ _eh, fuck it, why not?_ ’ and takes the man up on his offer.

He isn’t expecting it to be Singer.

“Of course,” She says when she steps in the room to find him, “Who else?”

Arthur, feeling awkward in his nudity for the first time in years, manages out a, “’Least I didn’t scare y’ this time.”

She mutters something – Arthur doesn’t catch what – and lets out a long breath. A professional mask overtakes her features as she paces further into the room, “I’ll be starting with your hair, if that’s alright,” She rounds him, and he can hear her shuffling around for a moment. Wood sliding over wood as she pulls over a stool, more scraping as she arranges the side table into a position that’s more convenient for her.

He catches her hands in the corner of his vision, peeling her gloves off and setting them aside, scooping up the small metal cup on the side table. She reaches around in front of him, dipping the cup into the already clouded bath water and filling it. Her wedding ring has been removed, and before he can stop himself, Arthur is asking, “What does your husband think’a you doin’ this?”

Her hand stills for a moment before continuing its course and disappearing back out of his sight, “Sit forward, please,” Her other hand presses over the skin between his shoulders, splayed fingers urging him to comply.

“My husband is free to his own opinions,” She sounds out slowly, free hand reaching from his back to his chin, leading him to tip his head back, “just as I am free to my own actions,” She pours the warm bath water out over his hairline, one hand braced lightly against Arthur’s forehead. His scalp itches, gritty with dust and dirt, “Not that my marriage is any business of yours.”

Arthur is silent as Singer eases him back into a reclined state, taking a moment to soap up her hands before delving into his hair. She does her job thoroughly, her ministrations a welcome massage. Arthur is in something like a trance when she finally says, after what must have been much deliberation, “My husband and his family have gone a long way to accommodate to me. At the time it didn’t seem such a bothersome expense to them, but times have changed. I’m beginning to suspect that their funds not as plentiful as they used to be.”

“So you work.”

An affirmative hum, “So I work.”

“Can’t imagine this job bein’ too rewardin’.” A huffed laugh sounds from behind him at that, and Arthur closes his eyes, enjoying the sound.

“No,” She chuckles blandly, “It’s really not.” Her hands pull back, dipping into the water to rinse off the thickest of the lather she’d created. He can hear her pick up a metal bucket, hanging it by the handle on the hook at the head of the tub to catch the soapy water that’s produced as she rinses his hair with another cup full of water, “Fifteen cents an hour, average of four hours a day, six days a week,” She says, pouring out another cup, “Three dollars and sixty cents a week,” She scoffs, “Talk about slow-going.”

“What about fishin’?” Arthur asks as she rinses out the last of the soap, “You’re good ‘t that.”

“I make more sellin’ my catch than I do working here, sure,” Singer says as she plucks a clean rag up from the side table and dunks it in the bath, “But it’s not always a sure thing. Good bait costs money, so I’m not always turnin’ a profit once all is said ‘n done.” She lathers the rag, “This place is a nice, safe, constant,” Taps at his shoulder with two fingers, “Sit up, please.”

Arthur does as he’s told, giving a little grunt as she begins to scrub the rag over his back, “Consistency’s good, I s’pose.”

“Haven’t the skills to be doing much else.”

The roughness of the rag feels good against Arthur’s skin, more-so with the knowledge that it’s serving to scrape away all the grime of the past week, “What about singin’?” He asks, “Yer mighty good ‘t that.”

“I only sing for myself,” Singer informs him as she takes to washing his shoulders. Arthur thinks it’s a right shame, but the subject is clearly a sore one, if her clipped tone is any indication.

“You been practicin’ like I showed ya?” He inquires rather than pressing.

“Hmm?” Singer hums, only half paying attention, as she tosses the rag down on the side table.

“Yer shootin’.”

“Ah,” She fills the tin cup, pours it slowly over Arthur’s back, dragging it along the span of his shoulders, “When I have the time.” The tin cup gets set down, “I hit a can this mornin’.” She sounds proud, and Arthur feels a slight of the same on her behalf, “Not the one I was aimin’ for, but it was _a_ can, so I’d like to think that it’s an improvement.”

“Keep workin’ at it and you’ll get there,” Arthur tells her as she stands up, wiping her hands on her apron and dragging her stool and the side table over to the right side of the tub, unhooking the bucket to set it by her feet as she sits back down.

She grabs for her rag, dips it into the bath and rings it out over the bucket. Lathers the rag again and reaches to remove Arthur’s arm from its place resting along the lip of the tub. They fall into silence then, as Singer holds his arm over her lap by the wrist, gentle but thorough in her ministrations. It’s not as easy of a silence as they’d fallen into when they’d been fishing – he can’t hardly expect it to be, with one of them being naked and the two of them being practically strangers – but it’s far from uncomfortable.

Singer starts humming to herself after a while, Arthur doesn’t even think she notices that she’s doing it. Just watches her with open fascination as she gingerly cleans his bruised knuckles, no longer raw but also not quite healed enough for her to be scrubbing with any sort of force without opening the cuts up again. Her melody is slow and lilting, dipping low for a few beats before turning over into a high note, a relaxing sound that counters how intensely focused she is as she works at her task. The image has Arthur stifling a fond chuckling in the back of his throat.

The spell is broken, then, the not-quite-song cutting off. Singer clears her throat awkwardly, ducking her head to re-focus on her task. She seems more aware of herself after that, careful not to space out as she had been. Time passes slowly but favorably, only seeming to have gone by quickly once Singer has finished and stands to dismiss herself, only acknowledging Arthur once as she dries her hands on her apron, locking eyes with him.

Then she’s nodding politely, turning on her heels, and walking right back out of his life.

 

*********

 

>   _[Though no mention of the singer is made, several sketches of bandaged hands can be found scattered randomly throughout the next few pages of entries]_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Unfortunately for the both of them, their next encounter won't be under such favorable circumstances.
> 
> I'mma be honest, I dunno how I feel about the bath scene. I enjoyed writing it and I like how it came out, but something about it is just... _off_ to me. Anyways, drop me a comment to let me know how you felt about the chapter. They're super motivating in terms of me getting chapters out quickly and generally, just helpful all around.


	6. As The Days Begin to Bleed Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's the point?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied when I said this chapter would be The Chapter, I also lied when I said that when Royce and Arthur next met it would be under Bad Circumstances. No matter how I wrote it, it felt way too abrupt, hence this chapter being kind of a filler-esque montage of scenes to show the passage of time, check in with Royce, establish her a bit more as a character, and lead into The Chapter. 
> 
> But next time, my loves, next time For Sure.
> 
> Also, I'm gonna be honest. I don't like this chapter - which is most of why it took so long for me to update. I'm not at all happy with how this chapter came out, and I don't think I ever will be, but, as my high school painting teacher used to say (usually before or as she took my paintbrushes away) there's a difference between 'perfect' and 'done.'
> 
> Finally, from this point on, POV changes will be signified by XXX, while regular scene changes will be signified by line breaks, though, in some cases (like in this chapter), XXX will signify both a POV change and a scene change.

The first few weeks were far from easy – being cut off from her meds cold-turkey, adjusting to living life in the wrong damn time period, getting used to… well, _everything else_ that came with that territory. But, in a way, it was almost _better_ when Royce first got here and had no idea what was going on or what she was going to do.

She’s settled now. It’s stopped feeling like a fever dream. Started feeling _normal_. There’s been a shift, now – now, when the dream-like feeling has ended, and a sense of _normality_ has begun to set in.

That numb, empty feeling of hopelessness has begun to creep back in, and, with it, the ever-constant need to be _doing something_ every waking hour of her life just to distract herself from it.

Royce has always been cursed to be an early riser. She’s a morning person, yes, (if you can even call it morning) but not by choice. Three a.m. – that’s when Royce wakes up. It doesn’t matter how late she stayed up the night before, or how physically draining the day previous was, she wakes up at precisely three a.m. Don’t ask her how her body _knows_ it’s three, it just bloody does. Always has, probably always will.

Back home, she’d slip out of bed, take a frigid two-minute shower to wake herself up, swish around some mouthwash (why brush before breakfast?) and retreat downstairs to her _Mental Breakdown Basement_ (to quote her late husband), a rec-space-turned-lair dedicated to her various emotional outlets slash ~~obsessions~~ hobbies.

She’d lock herself away, turn the radio up too loud, and just… _let go_.

Sink into the highlighter yellow, vaguely banana-shaped beanbag chair in the corner with a glass of wine, her sketch book, and a pack of micron pens to design tattoos that she may or may not decide to add to her collection one day. Break out her good oil paints, change into a painting shirt, and go ape shit on the biggest canvas she could find. Cycle through yoga poses and ballet stretches in some half-assed attempt to find inner peace, only to devolve into dancing until she collapsed, sprinting on the treadmill until her legs gave out or wrapping her hands to beat on her father's old punching bag until her biceps began to burn with the effort.

Park her ass at her soldering bench and mindlessly weld together bits of scrap until she’s created a metallic abomination that could almost certainly double as a murder weapon.

Here, a lot of those things aren’t exactly an option.

Royce finds ways to improvise.

She dumps a bucket of water over her head (fresh from the Downes’ well; surprisingly cold), rings her hair out, and pops a handful of mint leaves into her mouth to chew on as she runs laps around the property, barefoot, in her half-soaked night shift, probably looking batshit crazy. But that’s alright – there’s no one around to see her, and really, even if there were, it wouldn’t exactly be false advertising.

Royce stopped feeling sane a long, long time ago.

After her run, Royce creeps back into the house and returns to her room to wait out the dawn. A week ago, she’d be sketching or recording the sheet-music and lyrics to her favorite songs (she’s going to start forgetting them eventually, she realized; end up with nothing but a vague memory of the chorus), but circumstances have changed.

Mr. Downes is sick.

Royce can’t even properly recall when the coughing first started (he had been well enough when she first arrived), but they hadn’t thought much of it at first. It had just been a nagging tickle in the back of his throat – spring allergies, or so it had seemed.

It turned out to be more than that, obviously.

The Downes’ are trying to pretend that nothing’s wrong, that everything’s just business as usual, but Royce can _feel_ the underlying current of panic in the air. With every day that passes that Mr. Downes continues to cough, with every time he has to stop in the middle of some trivial task, heaving to catch his breath. It’s like they all just _know_ , all collectively have a terrible feeling deep in their guts, but they refuse to even acknowledge that it’s a problem, because acknowledging it will just make it that more real.

Royce had poked her head into the doctor’s office in Valentine, once. She’d inquired, subtly, about his practice and capabilities, quickly finding out that he was not only a fucking letcher that Royce was not going to find herself alone in a room with a second time, but, Royce is pretty sure, not an actual trained medical practitioner of any kind.

So, Royce begrudgingly took what little savings she’d accumulated and trusted Mr. Karson (the general store owner) to trust his supplier from some nearby city or another with a purse of her money and instructions to buy whatever medical texts they could find with it. Well, Royce’s _exact_ request was for ‘comprehensive medical texts on common ailments’ and/or ‘guides to homeopathic medicine,’ but the courier – Royce suspects – must not have known what any of that meant, because he just brought back a bunch of used books with the words ‘medicine’ or ‘treatment’ somewhere on the cover.

About as helpful as it sounds, but Royce supposes that’s what she gets when she trusts her money to the vocabulary of a lower-class man from the late 1800’s who’s, come to think of it, probably not even entirely literate.

 _Anyways_.

These days, Royce spends her post-run time trying to make sense of the medical textbooks (without her usual dose of Adderall, concentrating on things that would usually bore the crap out of her – such as biology – is a bloody fucking _battle_ ) so that she can, maybe, learn something that could be applied practically to Mr. Downes’ situation. But, seeing as Royce’s library is limited to a medical dictionary, several books on anatomy, a book on women’s health, a text on combat medicine, and a pair of pamphlets about childbirth and treating foot fungus respectively, she hasn’t exactly had much luck on that front.

If she’s being honest, though, she hadn’t had much hope for that plan to begin with.

Royce is a bonafide Creative Genius, sure, and if you ever need somebody’s nose broken, or somebody verbally eviscerated to within an inch of their life, Royce is your girl, but when it comes to the more… _scientific_ side of things? To solving problems with anything other than scathing eloquence or, if that fails, brute force? To things that need a gentler touch?

Royce is entirely hopeless.

 

* * *

 

“Fancy seein’ you here.”

Royce doesn’t even jolt at the voice anymore, that’s how bloody often they run into each other, nowadays. She was wary at first, of course – after everything that’s happened, she has a hard time trusting that running into the same person so many times is just coincidental – but, with the man always eyeing her like he’s not quite sure what he’s looking at (or, for that matter, what he’s supposed to be doing with her), it’s relatively easy to separate him from, well.

That.

“Mornin,’ cuz.” Royce drawls, half asleep, from her place alongside the riverbank.

“Was ridin’ down this way with plans t’ hook myself some fish anyways – y’ mind ‘f I join ya?” Eastwood asks, gesturing vaguely at the river. For what must be the fifth time, she considers asking his name, but they’re kind of beyond that now. Like, they’ve seen each other so many times, had so many half-conversations and shared so many sort-of silences that it’d be weird to just suddenly ask. Besides, if he wanted to play the name game, he would have asked for hers or offered his own by now.

“Knock yourself out.” Royce says, stifling a yawn behind her hand.

She can hear Eastwood dismounting from that massive fucking horse of his behind her, leading it around to toss its reigns over the branch of a nearby bramble. No matter how many times Royce sees it, she’ll never get over that bloody thing – black and big as anything, with an almost skull-shaped mask of white over its face and matching speckles splattered all the way down its back to its hindquarters.

 _How fucking fitting_ , Royce thinks when she hears Eastwood murmur under his breath, “You jus’ stay right here, Haunt,” to the behemoth after pulling a retractable fishing rod from his saddle bags.

“Late night?” Eastwood asks, sounding vaguely amused, as he turns to approach her from the side just as she lets out another yawn.

“Eh,” Royce shrugs, flicking her wrist quickly to make her bobber jump. She still has no idea whether making her bait dance every once in a while is actually helpful or not in attracting fish, but it feels like something she should do. That, and it’s hard for her to sit for long periods of time without humming, singing/muttering to herself, or otherwise fidgeting, “Just been a long week.” More truthfully, it’s been a melancholy week; an indifferent week, a _numb week_.

A week that has Royce wanting to crush a pillow to her face and scream until she passes out.

Eastwood drops his head in understanding as he finds himself a seat on the rocks a respectable distance from Royce, which she appreciates more than he could even begin to understand. There’s something about the man that… _disarms_ Royce. Some non-threatening aura of safety that just seems to radiate off him (which is, honestly, half of the reason why she was so adamantly against letting her guard down around him the first few times they met).

When it comes down to it, he’s just… non-invasive; _respectful_.

Respectful of Royce’s personal space. Respectful of her personal privacy. Respectful of her wishes, almost always asking for permission. Respectful of _her_ , but not so respectful that she ends up a china doll; something pretty to look at, but impractical to play with.  

It’s… refreshing.

 

* * *

 

“No deal.” Royce scowls, swiping her loose piercings off the counter.

Fifteen fucking dollars for the lot of them.

Royce understands that money holds a different value here, but she’s fairly certain that if she sat down and did the math, fifteen dollars would be a rip-off even by twenty-first century standards. Between the cost of the golden baubles themselves and the cost of actually getting the piercings done, she’d easily invested over a thousand dollars – maybe even two – in them.

But no, they were too small, more likely to be bought for the purpose of melting them down and making them into something else than desired as they are – practically useless.

Fuck.

That.

Noise.

-Golden jewelry is _golden goddamn jewelry!_

Like hell Royce is parting with her piercings – most of which she’s had for over a decade! – for fifteen lousy dollars.

 

* * *

 

“ _’yer a’ v’ry pretty l’dy_.”

Royce laughs, but if not for the fact that the drunkard currently making puppy eyes at her is half-hanging off of Eastwood, whose expression of dead-eyed exasperation is truly something to behold, she would find this situation infinitely more uncomfortable and not nearly as amusing.

“That’s very kind of you to say, sir.” Royce says as she fills out the necessary information in Mr. Pattillo’s record book. She glances up, looking more at Eastwood than his thoroughly munted companion as she asks, “Name?”

Eastwood glances at his counterpart, clearly trying to prompt an answer from him, only to roll his eyes and give the man a jostle when his pointed stare is ignored, “The ‘ _pretty lady_ ’ jus’ asked yer name, boy. Ya gon’ give it t’ her?”

“ _s’ m’ny freckles_ ,” The drunk man slurs, head lolling to the side as he gestures pathetically in the general direction of where Royce stands across from him at the front desk of the hotel.

Eastwood’s face falls into a deep frown. He shakes the man again, a bit more forceful this time, “C’mon, kid, what’s yer name?”

Royce arches a brow, “You mean you don’t know it?”

The man looks almost offended at the assumption, “I didn’t ask his name t’ humor him, lady.” Eastwood cuts himself off as soon as the statement leaves his mouth, seemingly upset by the taste of his own words. His tone is markedly less harsh as he goes on to tell her, “Found him stumblin’ around outside the saloon, thought it’d be best to get him in ‘t a bed before he can get himself into any trouble.”

Royce just stares at him, unsure of what to think of that. It’s a… very odd thing – imagining Eastwood just plucking a drunk man up off the street and hauling him over here to help him get set up at the hotel for the night. Royce just hadn’t pegged him as the charitable type.

“d’ya think th’y go all th’ way down?” Eastwood’s not-friend (total bloody stranger, apparently) ponders aloud and, _oh boy_ , if only that was the first time Royce has been faced with such questions. She’s well aware that she’s more speckles than skin- people don’t need to keep commenting on it.

Eastwood sighs, frown deepening, “Does it really matter what name you put down?”

She takes a moment to think about it.

“…s’pose not.” She mutters, dropping her head to scrawl _Clint Eastwood_ on the appropriate line (she doesn’t very well know what else to write and the neither of the men across from her are offering up any suggestions). Before Royce can tell them how much the night will cost – it’s written on a card on the counter, yes, but it’s the most polite way she has to prompt somebody to pay; let them know that she’s gotten all she needs from them and they can go on their merry way now – Eastwood slaps the appropriate amount down on the counter.

Well alright, then.

Royce deposits the money into the register, fetches the key, and holds it out to Eastwood over the counter, “You gonna need help getting him up the stairs?”

It wasn’t a joke, but Eastwood laughs anyways, “Nah, I can take it from here, ma’am.”

“Suit yourself, cuz.”

 

**XXX**

 

“What’s her name?”

Arthur grimaces, bending over at the waist foist a sack of grain over his shoulder, “Excuse me?”

John frowns, leaning back against the water barrel behind him and crossing his arms over his chest. His face is healed now, but the scars look like they hurt like hell when he scrunches his face all up like he is, “You been different these last few weeks- calmer, nicer, _gentler_ , less like… well, _you_.” He sniffs matter o’ factly, “So, what’s her name?”

Arthur rolls his eyes, turning to walk the sack over to where the ladies have started to prep supper, “I am not havin’ this conversation with you, boy.” Maybe the two of them were there, once- but now? Not even close.

Unsurprisingly, Marston follows after him; an angry puppy nipping at his heels, “So you admit it’s a woman.”

“I don’t _admit_ to nothing, Marston,” Arthur informs him, “but seein’ as you’ve already gone and worked yerself up into a tizzy about it, there likely ain’t nothin’ I can say to you right now that’ll change your mind.”

“She’s a married woman, Arthur.”

Arthur’s stride falters under the implication, the idea that John somehow knows exactly who it is that Arthur’s been passing time with. His scowl deepens, and he can’t very well feign complete ignorance anymore, “I know.”

John stalks alongside him, looking like he’s gotten a whiff of something foul, “If you _know_ , then what the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

“I don’t fancy her that way, Marston.” She’s a pretty woman sure – might just be the most attractive woman Arthur’s ever seen – and maybe he _had_ been thinkin’ that it’d be nice to have her for a night or two in the beginning, but he’s past that now. Fucking strangers is all well and good – it’s easy, really, fucking a person he doesn’t know anything about. But once Arthur actually starts piecing together a woman’s personality, the urge to take her to bed is quick to evaporate, “She’s just interestin’ to be around, is all.”

“Arthur,” Marston says, far too familiarly, as he moves to cut off Arthur’s path, “Women like _that_ can’t care about men like us- they’d like to think they can, but they can’t. Not really.” Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “I shouldn’t have to be tellin’ you that.”

“Then **don’t**.” Arthur snaps, shouldering his way past the younger man, perhaps with a bit more force than is really necessary.

 

**XXX**

 

“You, uh… you alright, Roy?” Archie asks one morning when he pokes his head into Royce’s room to find her starfished out on her bed, her too-long limbs hanging off the sides.

Royce isn’t sure how much longer she can stand to stay here. It’s not that she doesn’t enjoy life with the Downes family, it’s just. Well. Life here has fallen into an endless loop of monotony – and when Royce’s life falls into monotony, _Royce_ falls into a deep depression. She’s been trying to ignore that yawning feeling for weeks now, but it’s gotten to the point where she doesn’t want to do anything anymore. What’s the point?

Every day is ‘keep your head down.’

Every day is ‘work hard; earn money.’

Every day is ‘worry because there’s not a damn thing you can do to help these people and you know it.’

On the one hand, Royce is a terrible person for wanting to leave when the family is so blatantly struggling – on the other, at the end of the day, she’s also another mouth to feed, another person to provide for who isn’t even family, no matter how warmly she’s been welcomed into their home.

Besides, isn’t the whole point of Royce’s being spat out here so she could get a fresh start? A life of everchanging adventure?

Royce heaves a long sigh.

“Peachy keen, cuz.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Feedback plz?


	7. The Catalyst

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all have probably noticed by now that I'm playing fast and loose with the cannon timeline. I really want to take my time with Royce and Arthur, so I'm extending the cannon timeline by- well, at this point, I'm not yet sure, but by at least a year or two. I just want to be able to write without having to worry about rushing things and trying to fit character development and new/interesting plot points into a storyline that's already fairly packed (back to back to back to back major things happening) insofar as chronology is concerned. 
> 
> Besides, given the amount of days in-game I spent doing fuck all to further the plot, no matter what the official timeline is, in my head it's always taken the gang at least two years to get from the beginning of the game to the final chapter.

Royce misses her tattoos.

It’s not like she’s _lost them_ , they’re still _there_ , but it just… hurts, in a way, keeping them covered. It’s strange, looking to her hands and not seeing the crisp black illustrations engrained in her skin. Her heart, her history, her very _identity_ had, quite literally, been mapped out on her skin. She may not have been happy in the twenty-first century, towards the end, but the last thing she wants to do it pretend like everything she’s gone through to get to where she is now never happened. To pretend that the ink staining her skin no longer exists is like cutting away a part of who she is.

So, yeah, it might be in her best interests right now, but it still hurts.

Hurts like drowning from the inside out.

Still, she finds herself doodling new designs in her downtime one Saturday morning – _actual_ morning, not Royce’s brain’s sorry excuse for morning – not feeling particularly up to the task of trying to decipher the textbooks piled on the floor beside her desk (which, in reality, is nothing more than a little table with a chair pulled up to it). She has no idea how long she’s been parked there, dot stippling mutated humpback whales of various shapes and sizes, but it’s definitely been a few hours, if the mid-morning light coming in her window is any indication.

She’s halfway through a particularly gothic rendition of an eight finned, six eyed whale when a soft knock sounds at her door.

“Yeah.” Royce says more than asks, not bothering to look up from her sketchbook.

The door eases open slowly, and Archie pokes his head into his-now-Royce’s room.

At the look on his face – that tentative ‘ _I’m about to ask you a question_ ’ look – Royce tucks her pencil behind her ear and drops her chin into the hell of her palm, “Wassup?”

“Was gonna take Nisha to the pond to hook some fish fer dinner…” He trails off, seeming less certain of himself with every word that leaves his mouth, “I, ah… thought you might wanna come along?”

Pursing her lips, Royce glances down to her doodles and back up to the boy. After a moment’s deliberation, she pushes the leather-bound sketchbook aside and eases out a long sigh, “Sure, I could do with some air. Gimme a few minutes an’ I’ll be ready to go.”

Archie’s shoulders relax, face stretching into an excited smile that will never not remind Royce of a giddy puppy, “I’ll go get Nish’ saddled up, then.” And with that, the teenager is ducking out of the room, too pleased to even remember to pull the door closed behind him.

Royce cracks a smile at the empty doorway as she stands, shaking her lead with a light chuckle.

She dresses quickly, stripping off her night gown and stepping into a pair of black denim jeans. She pairs it with a yellow, high-collared blouse and brown leather vest, and, after a moment’s hesitation, straps on her gun belt as well.

It was the first thing here that she bought with her own money. After Eastwood happened upon her the first time, Royce had gotten paranoid. Back home, she’d felt safe knowing that she could hold her own in a physical altercation, if need be. People didn’t (usually) carry guns around in 2018, but here? In 1899, you’d be hard pressed to find somebody who _doesn’t_ have a gun on them at all times.

Royce might be quick and light on her feet, but no amount of agility will help her close a ten foot plus gap in the time it takes to squeeze a trigger.

 

* * *

 

Fishing with Archie is nice. Being back at the pond she got spat out in? Less so.

Despite it being closer to the ranch than the other bodies of water in the area, this is the first time Royce has been back to what she’s been inwardly referring to as The Mirror Pond. She hadn’t been avoiding it, per say, she just… she’d never exactly been in the mood to relive the horrifying feeling that was waking up underwater.

Because that’s what coming through the well had felt like; sleeping, then waking.

Not sleeping in the traditional sense, though. Coming through the well had been like slipping into a coma, sleeping for a hundred years, and then being snapped out of it without so much as a lick of a warning. Dazed and confused and a dozen feet underwater, not even fully awake and already halfway to drowning.

Still, Royce tries to make the most of it, if not for herself than for Archie, who’s clearly thrilled that she agreed to come along. Between the two of them, it doesn’t take long to wrangle enough fish for dinner, and soon enough they’re stringing up their catch and getting ready to head home.

“How’d y’all even get around, back where yer from, if ya didn’t have horses?” Archie asks absently on the way home, barely bothering to angle his head back to talk over his shoulder at her.

The question throws Royce off for a second. She’d eventually opened up to Archie a bit as to where – or, rather, _when_ – she’d come from, but the whole thing had been a lot for him to take in. He’d avoided her for a few days, actually, when she’d first told him, but he’d come around eventually, cautiously curious. Nowadays they don’t talk about it much, but every once in a while, he’ll blindside her with a question.

Royce shrugs, now comfortable enough riding on Nisha’s haunches that she no longer feels like she’s always got to be clinging to Archie for dear life, but not so comfortable that she’s willing to lessen her grip on the back of his saddle, “Cars, mostly- carriages, basically, that can move on their own without horses.” She explains, unable to recall exactly when it was that cars became commonplace. She thinks they must surely have been at least in the prototype stages in 1899, but she’s no idea off the top of her head when they were popularized, “I’ve always been partial to motorcycles, myself. Like bicycles, but faster- an’ you don’t gotta pedal.” Royce wasn’t in any way afraid of cars, but when it came to what she herself preferred to drive? It wasn’t any contest. Royce would choose riding atop a speeding metal deathtrap over being stuck inside one every time.

Archie’s opening his mouth to respond when a scream cuts through the air. There’s a moment of silence between them, as their brains simultaneously pinpoint the direction the scream is coming from, as well as the distance, before coming to the same chilling conclusion.

 “Mama,” Archie whispers at the same time Royce shouts, “That came from the ranch!”

Then Archie’s pulling Nisha into a sprint, and Royce is scrambling to move her grip from the saddle to Archie’s midsection without toppling off the palomino’s back. It’s the bounciest, most unstable Royce has ever felt on a horse, and she’s focused so much on remaining upright that she doesn’t even realize that they’ve reached their destination and are grinding to a halt before her chin is being knocked hard against the crown of Archie’s head with the force it takes them to stop.

There’s a man in the garden, Royce can see once she collects herself. Tall and stocky, holding Mr. Downes by the collar, beating him down as his wife wails desperately for him to _please, please stop!_

Royce sees red.

Lacking the finesse to dismount any other way in a timely manner, Royce pushes herself backwards off Nisha’s haunches, boots slopping in the mud as she lands, “Make sure your mum’s okay!” She calls over her shoulder, jamming a finger in the appropriate direction as she takes off towards the garden, vaulting over the fence and not coming to a stop until she’s got her hand fisted in the back collar of the assailant’s shirt and is tearing him away with as much force as she can muster.

 

**XXX**

 

“ ** _Enough!_** ” A voice rings out in the form of a livid roar, and suddenly Arthur can’t breathe, is flying backwards to land on his ass in the mud. Air punched straight from his lungs, he gasps to regain his breath, heart racing at the fright.

“Thomas!” Boots slop past him, a woman’s silhouette passing overhead through his sun-blinded vision as Mr. Downes’ defender rushes to his aid, dropping to their knees before him. Arthur pushes himself up on his elbows, and lightning-fast, the woman is drawing her gun from the holster on her hip, setting the hammer back and fixing it on him in one smooth motion.

Arthur stares.

The Singer’s molten brown eyes glare back at him, burning with unbridled rage.

Mr. Downes, half-pulled into her lap by her free arm, raises a fist to his lips and coughs- a raw, painful sound. Behind him, Arthur hears the garden gate swing open, and another pair of footsteps rush over. A lad, no older than twenty, plants himself at Singer’s side, wearing an expression that tells of too much worry and not a lick of an idea of what to do with it.

Careful not to shift her pistol off Arthur, Singer guides one of Mr. Downes’ arms around her neck and heaves him up with a surprising amount of strength, his forehead lolling helplessly against her chin as the man in question struggles to cease his coughing, “You take your father and get him and your mum inside, Archie.”

“Roy-” The boy begins to protest, but Singer – _Roy,_ apparently – is swift to cut him off.

“Do as I say, Archibald.” She speaks, tone stone cold, leaving no room for argument as she keeps her eyes fixed firmly on Arthur, “This gentleman and I are going to have ourselves a chat.”

 

**XXX**

 

Archie looks anything but persuaded, but he listens well enough, taking his father from Royce and leading him carefully around Eastwood. The man is still laying half-propped up in the mud, looking at Royce like he’s never seen her before in her life.

The feeling’s bloody mutual, only Royce is far too fucking pissed to be shocked.

“Your gun.” She says, “Out and on the ground, right now.” He doesn’t move a muscle. Royce can feel her nostrils flare, “May not be the best shot, yet, but I can guaran-fucking-tee you, I ain’t gonna miss from this angle. Your pistol, on the ground, **_right now_**.” Her final words curl into a feral snarl that spurs Eastwood into action. Has him slowly removing his pistol from his holster, mindful to keep his fingers away from the trigger, and tossing it down at Royce’s feet. Glancing away from him for less than a second, she hooks the steel-capped toe of her boot under the gun and kicks her leg up, catching the pistol out of the air with her free hand.

She pushes the chamber open, empties the bullets out into the mud, and discards the pistol with a hefty throw over her shoulder.

“Now, on your feet.” Royce gestures with her gun, “An’ if you so much as _twitch_ in a way I don’t like, it’ll be the last thing your sorry ass ever fucking does.”

He rises slowly, expression finally shifting from wide-eyed shock to a particularly determined brand of agitation. Once he’s fully on his feet, Royce gestures towards him with the barrel of the gun, not willing to take any chances, “Arms out, feet shoulder width apart.” And, when he hesitates, “Did I fucking stutter?”

Once is arms are out and his stance is open, Royce steps cautiously into his space to frisk him, unwilling to bet her life on the assumption that he’d only been carrying a single gun. When he turns up clean, Royce empties the chamber of her own pistol, tucking her ammo neatly into her belt, and holsters it. A peculiar thing to do, Eastwood must think, but Royce is much more confident in hand-to-hand altercations than any situation involving a loaded firearm. On the off chance he _does_ make a move on her, the last thing she wants is for him to swipe her own gun and turn the barrel on her.

“Now, we’re both civilized adults, so, would you care to explain to me just what in the bloody fuck it was you thought you were doing, riding up here and beating on sick, defenseless man?”

Eastwood sets his jaw, “Mr. Downes owes an associate ‘a mine a great deal ‘f money – I’ve come to collect.”

 

**XXX**

 

The woman’s nose shrivels, “And, what, you thought he’d crap cash if you punched ‘im hard enough?” Her nostrils flare, “-He’s not a friggin’ _piñata!_ ”

 “He borrowed money, he don’t have the means to pay it back- what would you have me do? Pat ‘im on the back?!” Arthur snaps back sarcastically, tipping his head aside with a vicious cross between a grin and a snarl.

The Singer – ‘ _Roy_ ,’ Arthur corrects himself – sets her jaw and looks him up and down with a quick flick of her irises, expression cold as death.

Arthur can’t recall the woman ever having such a presence – in his memories of her, she’s smaller, always half bent over or slouching, shoulders curled in as if she was trying to will herself into nonexistence. But, now, with her shoulders squared back and her head held high, she cuts an intimidating sight. What’s more, Arthur realizes for the first time that she’s _tall_. Standing only a few inches shorter than Arthur, she’s easily able to meet his eyes without having to tilt her head upwards like most folks have to.

“How much?” She asks after what feels like an eternity, “How much does he owe?”

“Three thousand dollars.” Arthur tells her, “Not includin’ interest.”

There’s a long moment of silence before she places her hands on her hips, not nearly as surprised by the figure as Arthur would have expected her to be. If anything, she looks unimpressed and less than convinced as she drawls, “You mean t’ tell me that you – _you_ , who probably owns a grand total of four different shirts and half as many pants – had _three thousand dollars_ just _lying around_ , waiting to be lent out?”

It’s Arthur’s turn to set his jaw, “Not _me_ , my associate.” Strauss keeps his funds separate from the camp’s, with the express purpose of money lending and other such schemes in mind. His numbers often run higher than the camp’s funds ever do, but, (as he’s quick to explain when they’re broke and all but demanding he contribute some of his cash) the money he keeps stockpiled is for _investing_ , not _spending_.

Roy shoots the house another look, this one tinged with the barest hint of sadness, “The hell’d he even need three thousand for? We’re far from well off, but we ain’t so broke as to need that kind of cash.”

“You said he’s sick, ain’t he? Reckon he wants to pay off his land, pay off his house – leave y’all with something to yer names ‘case he don’t get better.” Because that’s Strauss’ schtick, ain’t it; targeting the desperate, the folks who’ve got something to lose but not enough to hold onto it. Gives him the perfect excuse to take ‘em for everything they _do_ have in the name of interest.

Deed to whatever land they might own included, more often than not.

“So, rather than leave his family owing the bank, he’d leave them owing _you_? You, who was ready to beat him to death?”

“Desperate men do desperate things.”

The woman’s whole face twitches at that. For the first time since the beginning of the encounter, her gaze pulls away from his, “…Three thousand dollars,” She breathes, almost a question, but not quite.

“Plus interest,” Arthur says, tone warning, because he doesn’t at all like the distantly methodical look on her face; cautious revelation that quickly gives way to an expression of narrow-eyed thought.

When Roy does lock eyes with him again, it’s unflinching with a face full of hard-assed determination, “Transfer his debt to me.” She tells him, voice firm, “Transfer it to me, and you’ll have your precious money,” Then, face twisting into a judgmental sneer to rival Marston’s, “ _Plus interest_.”

It’s Arthur’s turn to be skeptical, now, “And where in the hell ’re you gonna get three thousand dollars, ‘ _plus interest_ ’?” He asks, crudely attempting to mimic her accent.

Roy’s face twists into a vicious smirk; a crooked, ugly thing when pitted against the beatific smile Arthur’s seen her wear in the past, “Take me with you, ‘an you can find out for yourself.”

 

**XXX**

“Absolutely not!” Eastwood snaps, eyes flicking up and down her form in a frantic sort of dismissal.

 “-and who the Christ are you to be so picky?!” Royce counters, vehement, “Your _associate_ is down three g’s, don’t you know? Who in the bloody cunt of hell cares who pays it or what they do to get it?! The family might not have enough to pay you, but I know for a _fact_ my talents could be worth way more t’ you than a lousy three grand!”

Royce is surprised at how little she herself is concerned by her sudden epiphany. She should be, she knows. She just offered herself up on a silver platter to a man who is definitely a criminal and who might as well be a stranger, for as well as she apparently knows him. But in the moment that the words had left her mouth, it hadn’t felt crazy, or scary.

It had just felt like the right thing to do.

And Royce knows she can do it, too- make the money back, that is. She did the math in her head; three thousand dollars here would (assuming she’s got the numbers right) amount to, give or take, ninety-grand in twenty-first century cash. Which, yeah, that’s a bloody lot of lettuce, but Royce was worth almost half a billion dollars back home. Sure, it was sort of an exponential growth thing, and getting off the ground had been rough, but she’d done it once, she could do it again.

Hopefully.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how much money Thomas Downes actually owed (if it was at any point mentioned in-game, I don't remember it), but I just. I've never been able to figure out exactly _why_ Thomas Downes needed to borrow money from Strauss. Sure, he's sick, but there are plenty of things around the farm he could have sold first if he had really needed cash that badly. This was just about the most justifiable reason I could think of. 
> 
> Anyways, thanks so much for reading and for all the nice comments! It's much easier finding the motivation to write when I know that people are enjoying the story and looking forward to the next chapter (I also love seeing y'all speculate) Till next time! <3


	8. The "Business Trip"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Just keep your gun holstered and try not to beat the shit out of anybody else.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A super short chapter in which nothing really happens, save for Royce and Arthur finally reaching the rock fucking bottom of their relationship, (that Enemies to Friends to Lovers tag coming in) but I wanted to get something out for you guys cuz y'all are awesome. You've also probably noticed that I changed the name of the fic. Initially, I had been planning on calling this chapter (which was supposed to be 4k+ words and include Royce's first night in camp) "A Fox Among Wolves" but then I got to thinking and a) I was never super crazy on Begin Again, I just didn't know what to call the fic when I published it, and b) tbh, "A Fox Among Wolves" just seems more fitting fore the fic as a whole. Anywho, y'all let me know what you think of it.

“Is this really necessary?” Royce scoffs out of the corner of her mouth as she stalks back to the house, Eastwood following far too closely for her comfort. Not even following so much as he’s _looming_.

So much for respecting her personal space.

“If you’re ‘ _talents_ ’ are worth ‘s much as you claim ‘em to be, I ain’t lettin’ you outta my sight.” Comes his jaded reply. They’d gone back and forth, spitting arguments at each other, for the better part of the last half-hour before Royce had finally gotten him to relent and see things her way. (If she’s being honest, she still doesn’t think he’s convinced, just thinks he’s tired of arguing and has reached that perfect mindset of ‘fuck it’ that precedes most – if not all – of Royce’s own questionable life choices.)

She’d _given the bastard her gun_ as a show of good faith, but even that hadn’t been enough to convince him that she wouldn’t bolt at the first given opportunity.

“Just keep your gun holstered and try not to beat the shit out of anybody else.”

 

**XXX**

When Roy steps through the front door, the lad from before – the husband, he presumes – is quick to come rushing towards her, only to stutter to a halt, eyes widening as Arthur ducks through the open doorway behind her. Roy doesn’t give the boy a chance to speak, just addresses him coolly, “Your father alright?”

The lad – Archie, Arthur thinks she called him – looks from his wife to Arthur, gaze lingering for a moment on the latter before returning to the former, “Ma’s got him in the bedroom resting, had t’ set his nose- thinks he may’ve cracked a rib or two.”

Roy’s eyes slide shut, nostrils flaring in a silent show of displeasure. When they open, she offers a clipped nod and tells him, “Keep him in bed, then. Help ‘im up to walk around a bit every now and again, but don’t let him do any heavy lifting or bending.” Then, in a decidedly less neutral tone, “His debt is handled. Make sure he doesn’t do anything else so shit-stupid ‘fore I get back.”

“ _B-back_?” He echoes breathlessly, eyes skittering from her to Arthur, “Where… where’re you goin’?”

“Business trip.” She tells him, not bothering to look him in the eye as she shoulders past him down the main hallway.

Wordlessly, Arthur follows her, offering the lad a cursory glance as he goes.

 

**XXX**

It’s times like these that Royce misses backpacks.

They still exist here- they’ve _got to_ , surely (if not, well… Royce can’t fathom why – what’s so difficult to figure out? You’d think people would figure out how to strap a bag to a person before they strap one to a horse, but who the fuck knows; humanity can be stupid like that, sometimes) but Royce has yet to see one. Saddlebags, it would seem, are all the goddamn rage here when it comes to transporting items, regardless of whether or not one actually intends on strapping said containment apparatus to a horse.

Royce tries (and probably fails) not to seem agitated by this as she goes about packing her things, all too aware of Eastwood lingering in the doorway.

From what Royce had gathered from her past interactions with Eastwood, he’d been camping out a somewhere out beyond the edge of town – not so close as to be encroaching, but not so far as to make trips from one to the other overtly inconvenient. Whether he’s been alone or with his so-called _associate_ , Royce doesn’t know. Was, frankly, a little afraid to ask, but it’s safe to assume that she’ll be sleeping on the ground for the foreseeable future.

With that in mind, she forgoes the packing of any sleepwear – as if she’d allow herself to exist in such a vulnerable state around Eastwood and any of his possible compatriots, anyways – and tries to remain practical in the remainder of her choices.

One extra pair of jeans, two additional blouses, a lovely greenish-teal dress handed down to her by Mrs. Downes (to be worn into town and _only_ into town), a few pairs of socks, and her usual nighttime headscarf (because she’s yet to find a hairbrush here that can stand up to her mane, and she’d rather not end up bald in her efforts to tame it). Miscellaneous items include the little drawstring bag she keeps her hairbands and piercings in when she goes into town, spare bandages, a bar of soap, her stash of mint leaves, and-

 _Jesus,_ how could she almost forget.

As discretely as possible, Royce also retrieves her cell phone and her wallet from the nightstand, wraps them in a swath of fabric, and shoves them to the bottom of her saddlebags.

It’s not that Royce thinks she was lying to Archie when she told him she’d be back, but she’d rather not leave what little she has left from the twenty-first century behind – especially when her wallet holds what precious few pictures she has of Killian and her parents. She’d never forgive herself if she lost them.

When Royce turns around to retrieve her journal from her desk, she realizes why Eastwood had been content to idle so patiently as she packed.

With perhaps more anger than the situation warrants – he is, after all, not her favorite person right now – Royce tears across the little room and rips her sketchbook from his hands, realizing a moment too late how possibly detrimental it could be to the pages within. With a critical eye, she looks over the pages he’d been inspecting- he’d worked his way backwards from her whale sketches from earlier this morning, which, Royce realizes now, were on full display when she’d lead him into the room because she hadn’t bothered to _close the damn book_ before she’d left.

And of course he’d just had to land on the pages he did.

Eastwood clears his throat awkwardly, eyes flitting to the designs in a vague gesture as Royce smooths the pages down, “Those’re… very nice drawin’s.”

Royce feels her nostrils flare, snaps the book shut, “You don’t _get_ to like my drawings, you backstabbing _cunt_.” She seethes, driving the spine of the notebook into his sternum with a snap of her wrist, “If you _ever_ go looking through my private things again without my _express permission_ , debt or not, I. Will Break. Your _Fucking_ Fingers.” By the time she’s finished giving voice to the threat, she’s deep into Eastwood’s personal space, pushing hard against his chest with her book, leaning forwards on her toes to put her own gaze above his own as she stares unflinchingly into his soul.

The effect is almost instant.

For a moment – for some quick, fleeting seconds – he shrinks back, intimidated. Then he’s rebounding with a vengeance, putting himself bodily in _her_ space and forcing Royce back on her heels as he brings up a slow hand to grip her wrist ( _hard,_ too goddamn hard) and direct the spine of her sketchbook from its place dug into his sternum, “ _You’re gonna wanna watch th’ tone you take with me, Roy_.” His voice is low, dangerous; gravel on her ears. The nickname _burns_ like a hot knife as it works its way into her skull.

But Royce can’t push back- she’s skating on thin ice right now, growing thinner by the second. The man she’s dealing with now is not the same man who’s almost endearingly _terrible_ at fishing and makes a face like he’s swallowed a particularly interesting lemon when Royce does something that throws him through a loop. This man doesn’t know her, isn’t her goddamn weekend _fishing buddy_ who keeps up with her banter and is keenly aware and respecting of her personal boundaries.

This man is just a stranger with bad intentions.

So, Royce backs down.

Pointedly lowering her gaze to his throat and shifting out of his space as she pulls her wrist out of his grip, she swallows, thick like cotton in her throat, before saying, “Mercy.” Then – because, in this context, she must sound like she’s _asking_ for mercy – she tilts her chin to meet his eyes again, no longer aggressive in her glare as she is respectably firm in standing strong on what little ground she has left, “ _Royce_ Mercy,” She tells him, then, after giving the name a moment to sink in, “But we aren’t friends, so you’ll call me Mercy.”

Eastwood looks at her for a long moment, expression unreadable, but not nearly as stormy as it had been.

“Arthur Morgan.” He tells her, after what feels like forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, comments give me life! I love hearing you guys’ thoughts, opinions, and theories!


	9. Introductions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Strauss sent you out on a simple debt collection job.” Dutch says, bracing his hands on his desk, looking down at the papers scattered across it rather than Arthur, “And you managed to come back with an entire _person_ — another mouth to feed.” He pauses to set his jaw, and Arthur can see the muscles of the man’s shoulders tighten through the back of his shirt, “Convince me, Arthur. Walk me through your thought process here.”
> 
> Somehow, Arthur doesn’t think Dutch will respond well to, ‘ _Because I got sick of arguing with the woman and gave up_.’

“I’ll be back before you know it.” Arthur hears Mercy tell the boy as she presses a kiss down into the top of his head. She murmurs something else to him that Arthur doesn’t catch before offering a deep-dimpled smirk and butting the back of her closed first against his chest. The boy smiles back weakly, heart clearly not in it as he bleats out an almost painfully fake chuckle.

Arthur doesn’t realize he’s rolling his eyes until the woman is turning back to make her way to where Arthur waits idly beside Haunt.

She eyes his mount with trepidation, hesitating for a long moment before tossing her saddlebag over his haunches. Then she just… looks at him, scrutinizing the horse with an expression that most men might wear looking over construction schematics.

“You gon’ mount up any time today?”

“Yeah, I just…” She trails off, not looking away as she makes several aborted gestures towards Haunt.

 _Please tell me she ain’t serious_.

Arthur pulls in a tight breath, pinching at his brows, “You don’t know how ‘t mount a horse.” It’s less a question than it is a declaration, because Arthur _knows_ that look. It was the same look the woman wore when he happened upon her target shooting – a look that, quite confidently, declared that its wearer had absolutely no clue what they were supposed to be doing beyond a thin hope that, if they stared long enough at the object of their curiosities, they’d surely be able figure it out eventually.

“That is not a horse-” Mercy defends, jamming a finger towards the animal in question, “-That is a _mountain_ with _eyes_!” 

Arthur purses his lips, physically restraining himself from snapping at the woman. Instead, he takes a quick step forwards and grips Mercy tight by the waist – which elects a truly feminine squeak from her – and foists her up onto Haunts hindquarters. He’d have given the woman the forewarning needed for her to sling a leg over the creature, if only he knew she wouldn’t immediately threaten bodily harm if he were to even consider touching her without her _express permission_. So, as it is, her body flops heavily over Haunt’s, leaving her scrambling to latch onto something before she slides off.

Mercy tugs herself into position after a moment of frantic yanking, finally getting a leg over the horse, then turns to stare down at Arthur with a touch of red coloring her cheeks, mostly hidden behind the thick wall of freckles cluttering her skin, “I _fucking_ hate you.”

“The feelin’ is entirely mutual, I assure you.” Arthur assures dryly her as he pulls the coil of rope from his saddle.

When he makes to pull the woman’s hands behind her back, she balks, leaning forwards and kicking the heel of her boot back into his chest, “The fuck you think you’re doing, mate?!” She shouts, accent growing thick in her agitation.

Arthur glares at the mud deposited onto his shirt and bats her foot away from himself, “Assurin’ you don’t knock me over th’ head an’ run off the second I got my back t’ ya.”

Mercy’s boot comes back with a vengeance as he makes another grab for the crook of her arm, “Honor system, dickweed; I gave you my gun, I keep my hands! How else am I supposed t’ keep from falling off’a this thing?!”

This time when Arthur grabs Mercy’s boot, he shoves it roughly into a resting position against Haunt’s flank and holds it there, grip like a vice, “You should’a thought’a that before you went and threatened to snap m’ fingers.”

Mercy’s nostrils flare, golden jewelry glinting in the light of the mid-day sun, “You should’a thought’a that before you went and snooped through my private things!” She snaps back at him, dropping her accent into a perfect mimicry of Arthur’s own drawl as she tries to rip her ankle out of his grip.

When it fails, her other boot comes around to greet Arthur’s shoulder with its mud-slicked heel.

Arthur wrestles the foot away with his free hand, pinning it against Haunt and snapping his head up to glare at her, “You kick me again, woman, I’mma tie yer ankles, too, an’ ride with you slung over this horse like a sack of goddamn potatoes.”

Mercy levels him with a harsh glare, and for a moment Arthur thinks she’s going to threaten him again, but then she’s snarling in furious defeat and thrusting her wrists behind her back. She turns her gaze forwards as Arthur binds her wrists, looping the rope around between them, too, so she won’t be able to slip free. Staring down her gloved hands – dark brown leather, fingerless – Arthur wonders, not for the first time, after Mercy’s insistence on keeping her hands covered.

He’d ask, if he thought it would get him anything other than a boot to the face.

Unlike the previous silences spent in Mercy’s presence, the silence of the ride to camp is anything but comfortable. It’s stiff, suffocating- painful, almost. Arthur itches to talk, to _say something_ to ease the tension, but he doesn’t know what he could possibly say, and, frankly, he’s much too exhausted by the current circumstances anyways to try and attempt conversation – not that Mercy would do anything other than bite his head off were he to try anything even remotely resembling friendliness with her right now.

At one point, as Arthur leads Haunt up a steep incline, Mercy kicks her legs forwards, hooking her ankles around Arthur’s shins and rearing back. Arthur feels breath, hot and spiteful, on the back of his neck, and then collar of his shirt is being wrenched back with force enough to make breathing uncomfortable.

It takes Arthur a spell longer than it should to realize that the woman’s taken his shirt collar between her teeth to stabilize herself.

Once they’re up the incline, and Mercy’s unhooked her legs and spat out Arthur’s collar – which lands warm and soggy and crumpled against the back of his neck – Arthur sighs and asks, “Was that really necessary?”

Mercy huffs, clearly no more enthused with what just happened than Arthur, “It was either that or a chunk outta your neck, cowboy. Or would you rather I’d taken a tumble and broken my back?”

Arthur’s only response to that is a begrudging sigh, and then it’s back to more silence.

 

**XXX**

_They’re organized_ , is Royce’s first coherent thought regarding Morgan’s people. She hadn’t known how many to expect – one other at the least (Eas- _Morgan’s_ supposed ‘associate’), four or five more than that at the most – but what Morgan brings Royce to is a much larger operation than that.

The watch-guard had been her first clue. A rough looking man, face littered with fresh looking scars – he might be younger, anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five, but between the scars and the stubble and weathered lines creasing his features, Royce really can’t say for sure. What Royce _can_ say, is that she’s seen the man before. About town, every so often, in and out of the board house on occasion, for use of their bathing room. Gnarly scars aside, he’d never _seemed_ a particularly threatening man, and the one time Royce had conversed with him – stood in line behind her in the general store, a pack of smokes tucked into his palm – he’d been perfectly pleasant, if perhaps a bit too interested in Royce’s personal affairs for her own comfort.

But, as Royce is beginning to learn, she apparently isn’t as good of a character judge here as she’d been in the twenty-first century.

—Not that she’d ever been under the illusion that Morgan was a good man.

No, Royce was smarter than that. She’d seen the cuts on his knuckles that day – fresh as her father’s had ever been on his worst days. Seen the scars that had littered his bared chest – what she presumes to be bullet wounds, both old and new, lacerations that’d never been stitched proper, that had healed in jagged messes. Royce had been aware going into their strange, detached, almost anonymous sort of friendship. She’d always on some level known, had been keenly aware, had realized that Morgan was, perhaps, not the best of men. But he’d been nice enough- had never made Royce feel anything other than safe and respected in his presence- and that had been good enough for her.

That had been her first mistake.

**XXX**

 

Lenny is the first in camp to notice that Arthur didn’t return alone.

Arthur doesn’t know quite _when_ Lenny noticed Mercy, only that he definitely did at some point, because when Arthur reaches the hitching posts and dismounts, he turns to find Lenny, ready and waiting to take Haunt off Arthur’s hands for a rub down. He’d have to be blind _not_ to have noticed the woman still residing on Haunt’s hindquarters, but he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at her as he greets Arthur like he would any other day.

Arthur greets the lad in kind, but when he turns and reaches out to help Mercy down from the mount, he gets his arm nudged away with the toe of her boot. Arthur snaps his head up, mouth opening to scold her, but takes a pause at the glaring shift her attitude has undergone.

The woman’s expression is carefully neutral, dignified like the look Ms. O’Shea so often wears, but not nearly as condescending. She doesn’t say a word as she shifts, carefully bracing her hands behind her and swinging her opposite leg over to slip down from the horse with as much grace as she can muster, given her restraints. Once she’s landed, she offers Lenny a polite nod, eyes slipping shut for less than a moment as if she were tipping an imaginary hat. Then she’s squaring her shoulders back, holding her head high with an air of detached confidence about her that definitely hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier.

When Arthur turns, puzzled at her change in behavior, she falls into step beside him rather than behind him, gaze flickering about the camp with casual indifference. She meets the eyes of everybody who notices her on their path to Dutch’s tent, attention lingering on each person long enough to assert her lack of intimidation- and perhaps even sow the seeds of her own authority in a few of them.

And Arthur gets it, then – restraints be damned, the woman refuses to look like a prisoner.

By the time they reach Dutch at his tent, the man in question is waiting, arms crossed over his chest with an expression that says he’s ready and willing to lose his temper at a moment’s notice, but is reserving judgement, for now.

“I thought you were working with Strauss today.” The man says when Arthur and Mercy come to a stop before him, “What’s the meaning of this?”

Mercy, eternally able to just _listen and obey_ for once in her damn life (he’d _told her_ to let him do the talking), takes a weighted step forward, looking every bit like a soldier coming to attention, “Your man came by today to collect a debt from the Downes family,” She tells him, tone firm but, thankfully, not aggressive, “A debt they couldn’t hope t’ pay. Now, if I thought it’d do any good, I’d ask you to let ‘em off outta the kindness of your heart, but I think we both know that isn’t how this game works.”

Dutch’s gaze flicks up and down the woman, all business. Then he nods, bidding her to continue.

“I’m here to offer my services in place of the money owed,” She says simply, and then, at Dutch’s pointed silence, she scoffs, rolling her eyes, “Upstairs brain, mate. Pretend for a moment that I’m a man, yeah? Now run that sentence through your head again- _that’s_ what I’m offering. Manual labor in place of payment, complete utilization of my skillset. I’d say, ‘ _whatever it takes_ ,’ but, well, there are one or two things I’d like to leave off the table. Other than that, though, I’m yours in loyalty, from this day until the day the debt’s been paid.” 

Dutch stares at the woman for a very long time, long enough that even she seems to grow perturbed by his lack of response. Eventually, his tilts his head, calling out, “Charles!”

The man in question appears from somewhere just out of sight.

“Keep an eye on this young lady for a moment while I have a word with Arthur.”

Charles nods, looking perfectly uninterested in the situation as he takes Mercy by the crook of her arm (and Arthur’s surprised she lets him, but he supposes she’s too busy frowning at Dutch) and leads her away as Dutch motions for Arthur to join him in his tent.

Arthur does as bid, letting the flap of the tent fall shut behind him.

“Strauss sent you out on a simple debt collection job.” Dutch says, bracing his hands on his desk, looking down at the papers scattered across it rather than Arthur, “And you managed to come back with an entire _person_ — another mouth to feed.” He pauses to set his jaw, and Arthur can see the muscles of the man’s shoulders tighten through the back of his shirt, “Convince me, Arthur. Walk me through your thought process here.”

Somehow, Arthur doesn’t think Dutch will respond well to, ‘ _Because I got sick of arguing with the woman and gave up._ ’

Instead, buying himself time to think of an acceptable answer, Arthur says, “Ain’t nothin’ simple about three thousand dollars bein’ owed.”

Dutch’s head snaps around, “ _Three thousand-_ ” He cuts himself off with an agitated groan, pulls a hand up to pinch at his nose, leaning even more heavily on his desk, “I will be having a talk with that man later, then, I assure you.” Heaving a sigh and letting his hand fall back to his desk, “But the woman, Miss…?” Dutch lifts the hand again to gesture vaguely in prompt.

“Mercy,” Arthur fills in, “Royce Mercy.” Just who in the hell would name their daughter Royce, Arthur doesn’t know.

“ _Mercy_ ,” Dutch echoes dubiously, “Her relation to the Downes family?”

Arthur shifts on his feet, “Married to the son, I think- overheard some folks in town gossipin’ ‘bout her bein’ mail-order. Dunno why she’s clingin’ to ‘er maiden name, still— you’d think she’d wanna be rid of it soon as possible.”

“A glorified whore,” Dutch sighs, pushing away from his desk, “Perfect.”

Something in Arthur prickles at that- not so much at the assertion that Mercy is a whore, but at the implication that a whore is a bad thing to be when there are several perfectly pleasant ladies in their very camp who, based on the day and their whims, could very well be considered as such.

Not that Arthur is about to actually say as much to Dutch.

The man likely doesn’t even make the connection— is too good at distancing the members of the gang from their work. Acts as though the lot of them are somehow above the moral ambiguity of their actions, an exception to the rule, better than the rest.

Different just by the virtue of being _them_.

“Look at it this way,” Arthur says, disliking the taste of his words before they can even leave his mouth, “They paid for her, yeah, an’ a woman like that, lookin’ like she does? You know she wasn’t cheap. Now, they owe _us_ money, so takin’ her as compensation is like- well, like takin’ the money they paid for her in place a’ the money they owe us.”

Dutch sighs, seeing the sense in Arthur’s argument, but still clearly none too thrilled with it, “There wasn’t any other way you could have collected payment?”

Arthur thinks of Mercy, sincerely ready and willing to shoot him dead if he so much twitched in her general direction without asking first. Thinks of Thomas Downes, so sick he could hardly breathe without devolving into a fit of coughing- certainly in no condition to be rounding up money for debt collectors. Thinks of the half-wilted crops in the garden, of the underfed livestock and of the furniture in the house that had been more splinters than boards, held together with too many nails and a lot of wishful thinking.

But making excuses for the family won’t go over well, either ( _“You’re too damn nice, Morgan,”_ and variations thereof seem to be getting thrown at him more and more often, these days), so he hooks a thumb through his belt loop and says, simply, “It was either the woman or nothing at all. This way we’ve at least given them incentive to pay, if they want ‘er back, and if they don’t, well, then at least we got something.”

Dutch kneads the back of his neck, eyes slipping shut as he deliberates. When he opens them, he tells Arthur, firmly, “We don’t need another mouth to take care of. You brought her here, you’ll be responsible for her. That means feeding her, watering her, and making sure she stays out of trouble; no pawning her off on the others unless they explicitly come to you asking to use her. You understand, son?”

Arthur wants to get angry, wants to argue, but he’s had enough arguing for today, so he only gives a resigned sigh and says, “I understand, Dutch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like a broken record saying it, but this chapter was supposed to be much longer. Real life has been kicking my ass, though (I've been trying to fix up my house to sell, but there's a LOT of work to be done and its frankly a bit intimidating, and I'll be taking a trip cross-country in a few weeks), and with Borderlands 3 dropping tomorrow (It still doesn't feel real, like, I've been waiting seven years for this, y'all), I know myself well enough to know that my productivity is going to PLUMMET once I get my hands on it. So I wanted to post something now, because I knew if I didn't, I likely wouldn't get around to it until at least late October, maybe longer. 
> 
> Also, I didn't expect Dutch to be such a difficult character to write?? Like, excuse you, sir???


End file.
